Why We Think There's a Multiverse, Not Just Our Universe 458
An anonymous reader writes "It's generally accepted that the Universe's history is best described by the Big Bang model, with General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory as the physical laws governing the underlying framework. It's also accepted that the Universe probably started off with an early period of cosmic inflation prior to that. Well, if you accept those things — as in, the standard picture of the Universe — then a multiverse is an inevitable consequence of the physics of the early Universe, and this article explains why that's the case."
Not the quantum mechanical multiverse (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You mean (Score:2, Informative)
That universe was destroyed by the Living Tribunal as Too Stupid to Survive.
Re:Not the quantum mechanical multiverse (Score:5, Informative)
Now, the story I’ve told you is a conservative one. In this version of the story, the fundamental constants are the same in all the different regions of the multiverse, and the other Universes have the same laws of physics—with the same quantum vacuum and all—as our own. But most of what you hear about the multiverse these days are from people who have speculated much farther than that.
They don't discuss any of the ideas about differing constants although others have done so.
Re: You mean (Score:4, Informative)
Honestly... some random guy off the internet couldn't do much worse of a job then most of the morons we put in office.
Misleading summary (Score:5, Informative)
It's generally accepted that the Universe's history is best described by the Big Bang model, with General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory as the physical laws governing the underlying framework.
No no no. It's generally accepted that each one of these theories taken individually is the best currently known description within its particular domain. It is not generally accepted that you can just throw them together and get an accurate description of the fundamental nature of the universe! In fact, we know you can't do that because general relativity and quantum field theory are deeply incompatible with each other. People have been working for half a century to find a single consistent theory that can reproduce the predictions of both. They've made a lot of progress, but we're still a long way from having any confidence about what the true fundamental theory is.
The picture of eternal inflation described in this article is plausible based on what we know. But it's still very speculative. That's true of any discussion of cosmology. Our current knowledge is just way too limited to have any confidence about it.
Re: You mean (Score:4, Informative)
You know, I'm coming to believe the same thing. Give me a phone book and a week and I'll improve on every nationally elected official just picking names at random and asking them maybe 10 simple, straightforward questions.
The people I encounter in my life every day in the normal course of business are uniformly better suited for high office than the jackoffs that have been elected.
Re:multi-options (Score:4, Informative)
"God"=="supernatural"=="not allowed by physical (natural) law." All of the multiverses are supposedly governed by physical law.
Nothing in natural law (i.e. physics) forbids the existence of something that does not follow natural law. It does forbid something natural (or possessing natural qualities) from not following natural law (insofar as it possesses such quantities), but that does not mean something supernatural cannot exist.
Re:You mean (Score:5, Informative)
Uhhh no. There's no serious cosmologist in the world who thinks we know even close to everything about the universe yet. The 14b year timescale works just fine as "the furthest we can see" because its well the furthest we can see. Nobody in their right mind claims that there's nothing beyond our ability to see.
And no the photons don't get "old" -- they get too far away. If your max speed is 100mph and I'm 150 miles away, there's no way you'll ever get to me in one hour. Same thing goes for photons. They have a maximum speed so if we see one, we know with absolute certainty that it can't have traveled more than a certain distance or it simply wouldn't be here yet. Short of discovering wormholes or other such objects that could somehow let light break c.
Though that's not quite right either. We actually can see a type of "edge" of the universe which is closer than the theoretical maximum range of a photon. Its the point in time when the CMB was hot enough that it was opaque to photons. Its essentially like looking at a wall of fog and not being able to see much more than an inch through it (though of course for different physical reasons!) If they ever manage to detect gravity waves to any great extent, its theorized that they could be used to gather information beyond the CMB wall (though gravitons would have their own version of the CMB wall at some point even further in the past.)
So yes, they do say "yep, that is as far as we can see" but there is definitely no "it must be the edge of everything!" conclusion drawn from that. There's all sorts of theories around regarding what was before / outside of the big bang. Trouble is, they're all unprovable because yeah.. its beyond what we can see or could ever see (again, barring the discovery of some way to break c.)
Even with gravity telescopes its pretty likely that we're just going to find a more detailed version of what we already know. Not guaranteed of course (there may be monsters out behind the CMB wall after all) but pretty likely -- still leaving the main "what came before time existed" question fundamentally unanswerable.
Re: You mean (Score:2, Informative)
And usually they have bigger tits. [superstock.com]
Greeks had that (Score:5, Informative)
The ancient Greeks had this system - it's called Sortition, or drawing of lots - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition [wikipedia.org]
The idea was that they didn't even vote, they just picked citizens at random for various committees, similar to how a jury is chosen.
Universal Internet Repeaters and Disciplined Minds (Score:4, Informative)
If the "tired light hypothesis" was true, and the "observable" universe was actually much older than 14 billion years, if could be possible for a system at the edge of what we observe to take information it has observed from further way and repeat it in our direction. Thus, even if photons from further way could not make it to us, in theory information could -- potentially from a distributed internet spanning endless quadrillions of light years of space and time. Thus the idea of a cosmological horizon is incomplete:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_horizon [wikipedia.org]
By the way, Hugh Everett's life is another example of how poorly academia often rewards thinking outside the box: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Everett [wikipedia.org]
Too bad he did not know how to escape "The Pleasure Trap" (which can be hard under stress):
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx [drfuhrman.com]
Sci-fi author James P. Hogan used the Many Worlds Interpretation is some of his sci-fi novels from around the 1980s and 1990s (not sure exactly when the first was). Hogan often championed the academic underdog, arguing they should get a fairer hearing, whether they were right or not..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_light [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Universe_(physics) [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halton_Arp [wikipedia.org]
http://www.thesunisiron.com/ [thesunisiron.com]
Semmelweis is another example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelweis [wikipedia.org]
One can see more extreme examples in times now despised enough to admit of them like Deutsche Physik or Lysenkoism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism [wikipedia.org]
Something to think about for the modern day (a book recommend by JP Hogan):
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/ [disciplined-minds.com]
"Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."
A different-but-related take on that by Freeman Dyson:
http://edge.org/conversation/heretical-thoughts-about-science-and-society [edge.org]