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Sci-Fi Science

50 Years of the Multiverse Interpretation 198

Posted by Zonk from the one-of-my-favorite-verses dept.
chinmay7 writes "There is an excellent selection of articles (and quite a few related scientific papers) in a special edition of Nature magazine on interpretations of the multiverse theory. 'Fifty years ago this month Hugh Everett III published his paper proposing a "relative-state formulation of quantum mechanics" — the idea subsequently described as the 'many worlds' or 'multiverse' interpretation. Its impact on science and culture continues. In celebration, a science fiction special edition of Nature on 5 July 2007 explores the symbiosis of science and sf, as exemplified by Everett's hypothesis, its birth, evolution, champions and opponents, in biology, physics, literature and beyond.'
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50 Years of the Multiverse Interpretation More

50 Years of the Multiverse Interpretation

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  • So in another universe of the multiverse... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There was no Sliders, no Crisis on Infinite Earths, no quantum mirror in Stargate?!
  • That the first thing I thought of when reading the title was, "50 years of anime?"
  • Looks like I got landed with the Universe where Slashdot didn't run the story.

  • SF (Score:3, Funny)

    by Skadet ( 528657 ) on Friday July 06, 2007 @09:19PM (#19775645) Homepage

    explores the symbiosis of science and sf...
    Maybe it's because I live in California, but San Fransisco is the first thing I thought of when I saw "sf".

    Wait, no, that's not why. It's because they're the same thing.

    ;)

  • Oh, great! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tomhudson ( 43916 ) <barbara.hudson@b ... m ['son' in gap]> on Friday July 06, 2007 @09:19PM (#19775655) Journal

    Just what we need; the knowledge that there are an infinite amount of dupe posts in the multi-verse.

    ... and that another almost-me is wasting time on a Friday night posting on slashdot, while another almost-me is partying it up like there's no tomorrow (of course for trhat doppelganger, there may not be a tomorrow ...)

  • MWI is cool and all.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Creepy Crawler ( 680178 ) on Friday July 06, 2007 @09:21PM (#19775663)
    But I'd like to know what consists a measurement.

    Quantum mechanics does weird stuff when you measure it (probability field of position/velocity).

    When something is measured, it collapses it... What causes the collapse?

    Perhaps consciousness?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by MichaelSmith ( 789609 )

      Perhaps consciousness?

      Greg Egan wrote a book [wikipedia.org] on that topic. Aliens were relying on non-collapsed wave functions as a part of their normal life. New instruments like the Hubble Telescope were causing mass genocide in the observable universe, which got some aliens pretty pissed off.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by thc69 ( 98798 )
        Thanks for the tip. Seems like a book I'd enjoy.

        The premise of encasing the solar system reminds me of a book I read where earth was encased for, IIRC, a similar reason. I just googled around until I found it. It's Spin [wikipedia.org] by Robert Charles Wilson.
      • In the book the characters deduce that "human researchers discover a way of modifying the brain to provide conscious control over the process, allowing people to suspend wavefunction collapse at will..." However, there is at least one passage that suggests that this is not the case. What it suggests is that the book is set in a universe where each of these improbable events just happen, and the characters (being in this special universe) infer that they are causing these improbable events.

        As a physicist, Gr

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Citizen of Earth ( 569446 )

      Perhaps consciousness?

      There is no good reason to believe that such a thing exists.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Lane.exe ( 672783 )
        Except for, you know, qualia.

        • Re:MWI is cool and all.... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Citizen of Earth ( 569446 ) on Saturday July 07, 2007 @01:36AM (#19777297)

          Except for, you know, qualia.

          Going beyond the semantic issue, the GP seemed to be implying that consciousness is something special, some unknown part of nature.

          However, suppose that you ask a person if they are sane. Should you believe their answer? The only means you have to evaluate the experience of your own consciousness is your own consciousness itself. If your consciousness wasn't some supernatural thing but instead was a little program in your brain to fool you into protecting your existence above all else by creating the illusion of being something special and supernatural, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

          Now consider everything that we know about reality. Does the universe work more like a precise machine or more like some transcendental mystical metaphysical drug hallucination? Consider everything we know about the mechanics of the brain. It is organized a lot like and its components are a lot like a computer. Is this a description of a ghost trap or of a computational device?

          The Earth sure does look flat, though, doesn't it?

          • Fry: You're a bender, right? We can get outta here if you just bend the bars!

            Bender: Dream on, skin tube. I'm only programmed to bend for constructive purposes. What do I look like, a de-bender?

            Fry: Who cares what you're programmed for! If someone programmed you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?

            Bender: I'll have to check my program. (short pause) Yep.

          • Qualia [philosophypages.com] refers to the subjective features of consciousness, which are not reducible to a naturalistic explanation. In the philosophy of mind (oooh, scary, not hard sciences!) it's used to refer to something that physicalists and reductive materialists have a hard time explaining. Myself, I'm a supervenient physicalist, meaning I think that consciousness supervenes on the physical, but cannot be explained by, reference to physical laws alone. Consciousness, and the study of it, inhabits its own scientific sph

            • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

              by Citizen of Earth ( 569446 )

              Myself, I'm a supervenient physicalist, meaning I think that consciousness supervenes on the physical, but cannot be explained by, reference to physical laws alone. Consciousness, and the study of it, inhabits its own scientific sphere that is not reducible to physics or biology or some other "basic" science.

              Well, good for you. Of course, your explanation above is the exact equivalent of someone telling me that they believe in God and thumping "the good book", or that they believe in magic. You may belie

              • No, it isn't. Much of philosophy is every bit as rigorous as hard science (though, I will admit, some is not); they (we, actually) are just working with different axioms and different data sets. My personal work revolves around uniting the three perspectives (computation, physics, and metaphysics) through a zero-player game model, much like cellular automata systems. Folks like Wolfram, et. al. give us a bad name. Popper's three-worlds hypothesis or Whitehead's Process and Reality might give you a taste o

                • Much of philosophy is every bit as rigorous as hard science (though, I will admit, some is not); they (we, actually) are just working with different axioms and different data sets.

                  Even if you do come up with a thoroughly rigorous and internally consistent philosophy of things beyond observable reality, what of it? There is no way to know if it's right, because it can't be tested. There are conceptually an infinite number of such philosophies, so the probability of any one of them being the correct descri

            • You post kinda clashes with your sig, here is a book that may line them up a bit better.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by arminw ( 717974 )
            ......It is organized a lot like and its components are a lot like a computer.........

            However, even a computer has this thing called software, an immaterial product of mind. No matter how minutely you examine the physical hardware of a computer, you learn little or nothing about its software until you turn it on.

            Jesus in particular and the Bible in general mentions the existence of another dimension, that of the spirit. It is in effect another universe, where different rules apply. He called that universe "
            • The bible is only sacred to those who believe in the divinity of its writers and protagonists. If I were to write my own bible, would you use it as screed for defining the Universe? No, because you wouldn't believe in my divinity. The problem, therefore, with attempting to argue such issues lies with the personal beliefs of the audience. What you hold sacred, the majority of humanity regards as a curiosity.

              Biblical mysticism first requires that a person believes in the supernatural. This in itself is an unf

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by arminw ( 717974 )
                .....would you use it as screed for defining the Universe......

                I never did and the Bible doesn't either. Both science and the Bible give hints that there are other dimensions. You did not read the last sentence of what I wrote before. Of course you can believe or not, but that is all. Nothing can be proven.

                (...Want to prove that Jesus rose from the dead?.....)

                I do believe that he did, based on the testimony of multiple witnesses. We humans tend to declare that which we do not understand as "mystical" or "su
      • Not only is there a reason for me to believe that my own consciousness exists, but (according to Descartes) it is the only thing I can be certain exists.* I can't posit that someone/something is lying to me about the existence of my own consciousness because without it there is no me to be lying to in the first place. I do consider it a fairly tiny and useful leap of faith to believe in the objective reality I observe, though.

        That being said, I don't buy that consciousness is required for a collapse in

        • Not only is there a reason for me to believe that my own consciousness exists, but (according to Descartes) it is the only thing I can be certain exists.

          However, you are a faulty witness to your own consciousness. Like Bender [slashdot.org], you may simply be unable to escape from your own programming.

          • However, you are a faulty witness to your own consciousness.

            For that sentence to have any meaning whatsoever there has to be a "witness" in the first place, meaning consciousness. Whether it all actually comes down to programming or not is completely irrelevant. No matter how you slice it, that the tiny subset of nature that is us is able to comprehend nature itself is pretty remarkable.

            • For that sentence to have any meaning whatsoever there has to be a "witness" in the first place, meaning consciousness.

              At this stage, we get bogged down in semantics.

              Whether it all actually comes down to programming or not is completely irrelevant.

              Irrelevant or not, this is the subject at issue in the entire thread. Most people seem to believe that their consciousness demonstrates that they are special and have a supernatural soul that will have an afterlife. However, there's no good reason to believe t

              • At this stage, we get bogged down in semantics.

                The only semantics involved is the definition of "consciousness." And if you're going to claim that a thing does not exist, it's kind of important to pin down what people mean by that thing in the first place. "Consciousness" is most commonly thought of as awareness, especially of one's own existence but also of one's surroundings. I don't think it's too big of a leap to consider this awareness to be equivalent to the self.

                Most people seem to believe tha

    • Re:MWI is cool and all.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by mazarin5 ( 309432 ) on Friday July 06, 2007 @10:06PM (#19775985) Journal
      When something is measured, it collapses it... What causes the collapse? Perhaps consciousness? No. It's just that once you've measured where something is, the probability of it being somewhere else is drastically reduced for a while. What's the probability that I left my keys in the kitchen instead of the bedroom? Let's say 50%. "Oh," a friend says, "I just saw them in the bedroom." so what does that probability become? 0%. It was measurement, not some mystic force, which reduced the area in which my keys are most likely to be found. It's no different with quantum mechanics.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by dissy ( 172727 )

      But I'd like to know what consists a measurement.

      Generally at the quantum level, a measurement or observation is when you bounce a particle (usually a photon) off another particle.
      It's similar to how you see things. Light bounces off of a thing, and that light bouncing into your eye is how to observe and measure things. Just lower the scale to a single photon of light (or even a smaller particle) and youre set.

      The reason you can't measure all the details of a particle at this level is because when the photon you bounce off it actually hits the particle

      • Re:MWI is cool and all.... (Score:4, Informative)

        by realmolo ( 574068 ) on Saturday July 07, 2007 @02:10AM (#19777471)
        You are mistaken.

        The reason you can't measure all the details of a particle at the same time is NOT because photons bounce off of it and disturb it. The reason you can't measure all of the details of a particle at the same time is because that is JUST THE WAY IT IS. It has nothing to do with interference from other particles. There is no "reason" for it. No one knows why it works that way. It's called "complementarity", and it's the fundamental quantum mystery.

        • The Heisenberg uncertainty principle gives a lower bound on the product of the standard deviations of position and momentum for a system, implying that it is impossible to have a particle that has an arbitrarily well-defined position and momentum simultaneously.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by snooo53 ( 663796 ) *
          The parent poster's analogy is correct in the sense that taking measurements are massively disruptive to a particle. Like measuring where a pool ball is in the dark by throwing things at it. You can know the position almost exactly of a particle at any given time, but then you can't know where it is headed next since the momentum is uncertain.

          The thing he didn't elaborate on was that until that physical interaction (and after it), the particle exists like a wave. It has everything to do with interference

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by kaidadragonfly ( 993636 )

        I'm not a physicist but at least from what I've read that's a rather common misconception.

        It is the act of measurement itself, not the interaction of the particles that causes changes we see in the particles. The collapse of a wave function is different from anything that we have in the macroscopic universe, it simply does not happen in every day life to an extent that we can view it.

        Quantum mechanics/physics/theory doesn't work like normal life.

        Analogies don't work properly when you try to explain Q

      • You can quite happily bounce a photon, for example, off of mirrors without causing its wave function to collapse.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by brunos ( 629303 )
      In the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics the wavefunction does not collapse (that is the copenhagen interpretation).
      Rather, all the *possible* outcomes of a quantum measurement do happen: each one in a different universe.
      When you measure one particular outcome, that means that you are in the particular universe where you measure that outcome: by definition.

      A measurement consists in an event that translates "quantum information" into "classical information": quantum information is very complex
    • in the MWI there is no collapse. That's what distinguishes it from other interpretations of QM (e.g. the Copenhagen Interpretation). Instead the MWI proposes that any time something happens, a new branch of the multiverse is created (one branch the photon is spin up, the other branch, spin down.) Yes, that's a REAL lot of branches.

    • Re:MWI is cool and all.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Chemicalscum ( 525689 ) on Saturday July 07, 2007 @12:34AM (#19776951) Journal

      When something is measured, it collapses it... What causes the collapse?

      No in the MWI the wavefunction does NOT collpse. This is the whole point of the MWI, in the Copenhagen interpretation the wave function collapses on a measurement to a single state. In the MWI a measurement splits the world into two different states there is no collpse of the wavefunction.

      The Copenhagen interpretation abolishes physical reality and brings in the idealist concept of a conscious observer collapsing the wavefunction. The MWI restores physical reality in quantum mechanics.

      Let's take the Schrodinger cat thought experiment: <cat alive|cat dead>

      This gives rise to the density matrix:

      cat alive ...................... cat alive + cat dead

      cat alive - cat dead ..... cat dead

      The CI supporters would say the MWI didn't explain why we don't see the off diagonal mixed states. But the modern approach to the measurement problems in MWI uses the concept of decoherence which is the interaction of the isolated quantum states with the macro environment. It has been shown that the mixed states are destroyed by interference when decoherence from interaction with the environment occurs. Thus in this experiment the world is split into two, one where the cat is alive and one where it is dead.

      The decoherence approach in conjunction with the MWI abolishes the necessity of observers and restores the independent physical reality abolished the the CI. The proliferation of many worlds is the price we have to pay for physical reality and the unitary evolution of the wavefunction.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tm2b ( 42473 )
      You've put your finger on it.

      The Copenhagen Interpretation puts a magical significance on "measurement" that boggles the mind. It' not just photons interacting with the system, it's those photons being perceived by a mind. What's special about minds? Sssshhhh, don't ask that question.

      This insistence upon putting the mind (particularly the human mind) at the center of the quantum universe reminds me of the insistence of the Medieval Church upon putting the Earth at the center of the Universe. I'm p
    • The wave function of a particle collapses due to interference with the wave function of the photon that hits it in order to be measured. It's called quantum decoherence [wikipedia.org].

    • When something is measured, it collapses it... What causes the collapse?

      There is no such thing as "wavefunction collapse".

      Apart from the second law of thermodynamics (which, it would be fair to say, we don't really understand), all of the laws of physics are time-symmetric. In quantum theory, causality works backwards in time just as well as it does forwards, and that includes interactions that leak quantum information.

    • What does consciousness have to do with it?? Do you think physicists are just sitting around watching photons and eyeballing the measurements? No, obviously they have computers and lab equipment that is recording that information, and will continue to do so whether a conscious person looks at it or not.

      The collapse of the wavefunction is caused by interaction with other particles. After the interaction, the particle has a new modified wavefunction.

  • *Interpretation* (Score:3, Informative)

    by rrohbeck ( 944847 ) on Friday July 06, 2007 @09:21PM (#19775669)
    Wasn't it proven that the multiverse interpretation is mathematically equivalent to the other more traditional approaches like wavefunction collapse and decoherence?

    I like SF as much as probably most people here, but I can't see the scientific significance.

    • The many-worlds hypothesis does have some serious problems, such as how a universe with probability p and one with probability -p cancel each other out. (The branching would have to happen "after" the cancellation.)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lawpoop ( 604919 )
      It seems to me that we are hitting the limit of what we can understand through measurement. At a small enough scale, measurement seems to break down, and then we get probabilities, and phenomena that are open to mathematical interpretation.

      So, being 'inside' the universe and taking its measurements from the inside only gets us so far. Beyond that, we have theories about the nature of the universe, but they can't be shown to be true or untrue. There are theories that are certainly untrue, but there are al
    • It's not the math, it's the explanatory power. Read The Fabric Of Reality [amazon.com] by Deutsch, for instance. The Copenhagen Interpretation [wikipedia.org] says "... and then a miracle happens" (meaning the faster-than-light collapse of the wavefunction). The MWI [wikipedia.org] says there's nothing faster-than-light about it; there's just no collapse.

      No faster-than-light travel, causality, single-valued universe. Pick any two. That'll give you your preferred QM interpretation. (Hint: FTL = CI, backward causality = TI [wikipedia.org], more or less, and multi

  • Mirror, Mirror (Score:5, Funny)

    by hedgemage ( 934558 ) on Friday July 06, 2007 @09:45PM (#19775837)
    Somewhere, a goateed version of me is reading the story, because that version has a Nature login.

  • Personal experience of the Multiverse (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rjamestaylor ( 117847 ) <rjamestaylor@gmail.com> on Friday July 06, 2007 @09:54PM (#19775891) Journal
    Ok. I'm going public with this craziness of mine...

    I've observed many times that I "should have" died. It struck me that, perhaps, I did die in an alternate universe, but I (whatever I "is") continue on in at least one of the multiverses. In those multiverses in which "I" experience the death of a close friend or family member... well... that just is how it goes. But they, too, continue in an instance of the multiverse. Perhaps I do not.

    Anyway... "They're coming to take me away, ha ah..."

    • I had to look closely to see if you had used the letter J [wikipedia.org]

    • Re:Personal experience of the Multiverse (Score:5, Interesting)

      by lawpoop ( 604919 ) on Friday July 06, 2007 @11:38PM (#19776589) Homepage Journal
      I had a friend and former roommate who was in an apartment fire. He was sleeping in bed when his cat woke him up by clawing at his face. He startled awake and saw that the ceiling was covered in flames. He escaped, certain that he was moments away from death.

      Luckily he made it out alive. But he suffered severe PTSD for a few years afterwards. He would just be walking to the grocery store and be suddenly struck with the terrifying reality that he wasn't walking to the store at all -- this was the final hallucination of his mind moments before he perished in the apartment fire. Instead of his past flashing before his eyes, this was his mind's final, desperate attempt to comfort itself, by creating a reality where he lived out the rest of his life.

      I try not to think about it because it's creepy. If I really start to think about it I get terrified.
      • If this were the case, then all of the wacked-out comments hea read on /. would really be hallucinogenic creations of his own subconscious. Freak

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by pureevilmatt ( 711216 )
        That sounds a bit like Donnie Darko.
      • What do your friend's mental problems have to do with physics? I know it is late on Friday night, but I'm not nearly drunk enough to believe your anecdote has anything to do with some sort of tacky, sci-fi, interdimensional communication.

        In fact, the ONLY lessons to be learned from your story are
        1) Check your smoke detector batteries, dumbass!
        2) Get a cat.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by lawpoop ( 604919 )
          It doesn't really have anything to do with physics. I was just replying to the guy who thought multiverses had something to do with his brushes with death.
        • In fact, the ONLY lessons to be learned from your story are
          1) Check your smoke detector batteries, dumbass!
          2) Get a cat.

          So... What if in universe B you didn't check the batteries because you flipped a coin that came up heads... Or got a dog instead of a cat because you killed the original cat in some sort of weird science experiment.
      • The cat. What happened to the cat?!

    • Re:Personal experience of the Multiverse (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Saturday July 07, 2007 @12:11AM (#19776813) Journal
      Quantum immortality [wikipedia.org].

      Note that this is not a very exciting kind of immortality. Especially since a goodly number of worldlines coming from here will produce computronium [wikipedia.org]. At least some of which will simulate you, yes you personally for an unspeakable amount of subjective time (possibly infinite if even one non-zero probability path leads to that outcome), during which you will in some cases experience what can only be described as "as close to a literal heaven as you can get", and in other cases "as close to a literal hell as you can get", and the full range of things in between. If Quantum immortality is "true", there are things worse than death, and we will more or less all get to experience them on some worldline.

      Note further that it is not meaningful to wish that "you" will end up in one of the good cases; if QI is true, all cases lie in your future equally. "You" will end up in the good and the bad and the inbetween, all at once. Perhaps some people consider this a form of escapism, but it is also fairly horrifying if you follow the implications out beyond "In some very real sense, I can not experience death."

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by resonte ( 900899 )
        Strange...I just made a post relating to QI.

        Life is suffering. If the mutliverse is true, then absolute hell really does exist in one instance of a Universe. If QI is true, is there ever really a way to escape 'reality'? Does everyone experience every form of existence for eternity? or instead do some of us go into loops of existence, and never escape the loop? Can we direct our path to a desirable loop?

        Some forms of Buddhism teach something very similar to QI, except that Nirvana is the end of all suf

        • Life is suffering. If the mutliverse is true, then absolute hell really does exist in one instance of a Universe. If QI is true, is there ever really a way to escape 'reality'? Does everyone experience every form of existence for eternity? or instead do some of us go into loops of existence, and never escape the loop? Can we direct our path to a desirable loop?

          Your willpower and intent allow you to chart your own course through reality. Hell is a very small and abstract concept, a creation of this world.
      • Well, I'm not sure about the numbers game here, but. . .

        People do not exist without intent or will power. You can choose what to experience.


        -FL

    • Yup, that's a well-known position, called "Quantum Suicide" or "Quantum Theory of Immortality". You shoot yourself, and in most universes you die, but in a very few the gun jams, the bullet is struck by lightning before it hits, etc. In any case, you always survive in at least a few universes (there are infinitely many), so you never "experience your own death" as it were. The dead ones are dead, the live ones think "wow, I made it!" Unfortunately it's far more likely you survive with terrible pain than

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by TheLink ( 130905 )
        Well what if there's no universe where the gun jams? All those universes were ruled out by other events?

        Sure most of the other Yous who decided not to do such a stupid thing live merrily on in their Many Worlds, but the Yous who decided to Quantum Suicide might find out the hard way that "the wrong turn ends here".

        Why should MWI mean that ALL chosen paths will avoid 100% Darkness? To me that's like saying the two slit experiment doesn't have destructive interference.
        • One of the tenets of the MWI is that everything that is physically possible (i.e. is consistent with the evolution of the Schroedinger Wave Equation, or similarly, consistent with physical law) happens in some universes. Maybe with extremely low probability, indeed (10^-30 or even lower), but nonetheless it happens somewhere. Things like all the coffee molecules in the cup simultaneously moving upward and the coffee appearing to jump out of the cup, for instance. You can compute these probabilities: p(on
    • 've observed many times that I "should have" died. It struck me that, perhaps, I did die in an alternate universe, but I (whatever I "is") continue on in at least one of the multiverses. In those multiverses in which "I" experience the death of a close friend or family member... well... that just is how it goes. But they, too, continue in an instance of the multiverse. Perhaps I do not.

      Probably the most interesting practical question is what percentage of futures include all our lost family members and f
  • I so wanted to read their take on it, but I gotta catch a flight back to my universe.

    Anyone who knows if they'll be selling this one in other universes?

  • Old (Score:5, Informative)

    by alexgieg ( 948359 ) <alexgieg@gmail.com> on Saturday July 07, 2007 @12:22AM (#19776885) Homepage
    The multiverse hypothesis is an ancient idea. I remember reading about a poetic image used in Hinduism to describe it: that of "Shiva's Necklace". It's said that the god Shiva, which together with Vishnu and Brahma form the (main) Hinduist Trinity, the Trimurti, wears around his neck an infinitely long necklace with an infinite number of beads. Each bead is a full universe, ours being just one among them, and Earth with us just an infinitesimal aspect of that single bead.

    It would be nice if scientists, when talking to non-scientists, drafted lively images like this one. IMHO, it would go a long way in bridging the gap between them and "normal" people, who don't think in terms of numbers and mathematical concepts.
    • Many scientists do come up with such metaphors for their work. There are two related problems with this, though: first, the metaphors just aren't that good -- most of the time it's simply impossible to give an accurate description of the problem without the math -- and second, non-scientists will refuse to put the effort into understanding the math, take the metaphor, and think they understand the whole thing. Especially when you're talking about physics, but really in most scientific fields, it is not p
      • Anyone who can't explain something in plain English doesn't understand it themselves.
        • Anyone who can't explain something in plain English doesn't understand it themselves.

          English is a very good language for describing a lot of things; but math is also a language, and sometimes (in the sciences, often) it's a much better one for describing certain things. You can often write the mathematical terms out rather than using symbols, of course, but honestly, when you're dealing with inherently mathematical subjects such as physics, that's as close as you can come without losing a lot of informatio
        • What about people who don't speak English?

    • Shiva, which together with Vishnu and Brahma form the (main) Hinduist Trinity, the Trimurti, wears around his neck an infinitely long necklace with an infinite number of beads. Each bead is a full universe, ours being just one among them, and Earth with us just an infinitesimal aspect of that single bead.

      It would be nice if scientists, when talking to non-scientists, drafted lively images like this one.

      So, you are saying that science should invent religion in order to explain the world?
      What an original idea!

  • In celebration, a science fiction special edition of Nature on 5 July 2007 explores the symbiosis of science and sf, as exemplified by Everett's hypothesis, its birth, evolution, champions and opponents, in biology, physics, literature and beyond.'

    All of them?
  • ... where they don't charge you $30 to download the text-only version of the article.

  • Wow, an entire thread on the multiverse hypothesis, and no one's mentioned Noein [anidb.info] yet? By far one of the best anime programs of the past couple of years, Noein depicts a conflict between alternative universes that comes to involve a group of middle-school kids in Japan. The producers actually try to explain some of the science involved, including a cute scene with Schrodinger's cat. One of the most experimental animes I've ever watched, and I've watched quite a few. The style of animation is rather unusu

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