Pages

Thursday, August 27, 2009

More Real Physicists On An Eternal Multiverse



This post is not an attempt to prove anything. You don't prove science by a popular vote.

It is another on inflation predicting an eternal multiverse.

Look, there are many papers/videos by real big-name physicists arguing for what I have maintained in previous posts like this one:
  1. Inflation is starting to be considered well established, experimentally proven physics that people need to take seriously.
  2. It seems inflation, no matter how hard you try to get rid of it, predicts an eternal nature to the universe.
  3. Furthermore it seems to always predict many pocket universes that we may or may not be able to detect experimentally. (This is still debatable.)
  4. There might be statistical ways of ruling out some of these ideas so, in addition to #3, there might be several ways of making these ideas falsifiable.
  5. People need to get over the idea that there was an initial signularity at the beginning of the universe/multiverse.  There are good reasons to believe there really was no beginning.
Don't get me wrong, all these ideas are very speculative.  But the big-name physicists who study theoretical cosmology are starting to really take this stuff seriously, and my claim is so should you. :)

Unfortunately, since physicists left to their own devices are often boring, you might not make it through all 66 minutes of this talk.  But if you could fight to watch just the first 10-15 minutes, you will see that see the issues we have discussed.

5 comments:

  1. I am for the theory of a multiverse, what means for example some parts can be in inflation and some others in deflation. So I really accept the fact that our part is in inflation and on an other side that there was no beginning.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Flatness alone -- with its prediction that space itself is infinite -- has interesting theological predictions we often don't consider. It predicts what Max Tegmark calls a "Level 1" multiverse, whether or not it exists in a "Level 2" multiverse (eternal inflation in a variety of models) or a "Level 3" multiverse (many worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics).

    Since there are a finite number of ways to fill any region of space, every region of space has copies and close variants of itself. That includes copies of US.

    So, for theologians, what is the relationship of our "spirits" to the "spirits" of our copies?

    FireTag

    ReplyDelete
  3. FireTag, That is an interesting point. Yes, and this is why these predictions are so wierd. Given enough copies of universes or patces of one universe, eventually patches are repeated. So I may be typing this comment in several different places. :)

    It's wierd, but seems to logically follow which is why I still continiue to wonder: what should we do with such theories?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Joseph, What I can't get my head around in a pluraverse/multiverse scenario is that each universe would then need to reside somewhere in relation to one another and this space where multiple universes resided would thus be the universe, whereas the universes would be more like parts of the universe, like galaxies are part of our universe.

    How am I to understand that, keeping in mind I am a guy who left physics behind after that C- in high school.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Matt W. This is a real confusing concept. A common confusing concept. There will be posts in the future on this. I know that sounds like a cop out answer for now, but it is complicated.

    Basically you don't need a space, (so common it has a name called an embedding space), that everything else resides it. Though this sounds confusing it is true and I will blog about it more later. I'm glad you brought it up.

    ReplyDelete

To add a link to text:
<a href="URL">Text</a>