First Observational Test of the "Multiverse" 258
An anonymous reader writes "The theory that our universe is contained inside a bubble, and that multiple alternative universes exist inside their own bubbles – making up the 'multiverse' – is being tested observationally by UK physicists, who are searching for disk-like collision patterns in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Though CMB is generally thought of as a uniform schmear of radiation extending in all directions in our universe, in fact, they say if a multiverse exists, there ought to be imprints trapped in the muck like footprints of where our universe banged into others."
first (Score:4, Funny)
in this universe at least.
Re:first (Score:4, Informative)
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Look,
If you wanted to observe multiple universes, I wish you'd have asked me earlier, mate. I'd have introduced you to my neighbour, Benny "The Shroom" Colforth.
Collision? (Score:5, Insightful)
If universes can physically interact with each other, can each really be called a "Universe"?
Re:Collision? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes. Inaccurately perhaps, but life goes on, the sun will still rise and fall.
Hume and the Irony Universe (Score:2)
Yes. Inaccurately perhaps, but life goes on, the sun will still rise and fall.
"Flaming Error" is claiming the sun will rise tomorrow...
It reminds me of Hume.
Somewhere, an Irony Universe has just bumped into ours.
=)
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It reminds me of Hume.
Hmm, it reminds me of Sextus Empiricus [wikipedia.org]. Either way, it's formally known as the Problem of Induction [wikipedia.org].
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"Infinitely certain, no, but best belief, absolutely, overwhelmingly, so much so that only a really, really silly person would seriously assert the contrary."
And then invests that "probable" with enough weight to make someone dissenting "feel silly" -- I wonder how silly the guy who found the first black swan felt.
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'universe' comes from Latin words meaning something like "rolled into one". 'University' for example, was originally a synonym for 'guild'. Students in Bologna, Italy, in the Middle Ages formed a guild or university to have bargaining power with tradesmen, landlords, and teachers. The idea caught on and that's how European Universities got started.
So, 'multiverse' could mean 'rolled into many', which to me doesn't seem too far off the mark the way it's applied. Anonymous coward says he (or she or it) pr
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The irony is that the theory that the sun rises and falls proved overly simplistic, but we keep repeating the inaccurate terminology even today. And nobody really notices or cares.
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In what way did it prove overly simplistic? For anyone who isn't an astronomer, in what way is that not a sufficient description of what happens?
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Follow the posts up for context.
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"Can" and "Could" are two different things, especially when you're looking at the CMB. It emanates from the initial state of the universe, before the time when the laws of physics as we know them had formed. The other universes are not this universe because they degenerated to different laws. But before then, it was one big multiverse stew.
Or some silly shit like that.
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Also if our universe is a slice of a higher dimension (ie if our own universe is a 4 or more dimensional slice of an n dimensional universe), there may be others in other slices that we have no way of detecting (that I know of at least :p ). Such alternate universes would be pretty meaningless if we had no way of testing for their existence though..
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Such alternate universes would be pretty meaningless if we had no way of testing for their existence though..
Unless they had a way of testing for our existence, and of developing a way to tell us of it.
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Unless they had a way of testing for our existence, and of developing a way to tell us of it.
Unless they had a way of testing for our existence, but upon observation, we behave like Schrödinger's cat.
FTFY
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We behave a lot more like the Three Stooges.
And really, who wouldn't want to be a part of that?
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Unless they had a way of testing for our existence, and of developing a way to tell us of it.
I see you've invoked Flatland [wikipedia.org].
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"Can" and "Could" are two different things, especially when you're looking at the CMB. It emanates from the initial state of the universe, before the time when the laws of physics as we know them had formed.
Uhhh... no.
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Err, no.
Putting aside your citing Yahoo answers as being both an ad hominem (yet still hilarious) I should like to point out the the laws of physics before the big bang - the ones that Yahoo answer was referring to - aren't necessarily the same as the ones that occurred after it in the early Universe - i.e. after the big bang during the bold, quoted period in the post you're trying to correct.
If you want to argue that the laws of nature are mutable then by all means try, but you will also have to show that
Re:Collision? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but our universe is called Universe A. You can be Universe B.
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Bite my glorious golden ass.
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Well theoretically they would each be started by separate big bangs, and possibly even have slightly different laws of physics. So yes Universe is what we are calling our enclosure that contains our physical realm, with multiverse being the larger unit.
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Oh my god -- wow -- what a mind blowing concept...
If more than one universe, can it really be called a universe?
Maybe we will need to call it something else...
If more than one universe - hmmm - that'd possibly be very many.
Many is multiple of one...
I got it!
We'll call it a MANYVERSE! .. that doesn't have a catchy enough ring to it.
No... wait
Many... mega... multi... multiple... hmmm....
Multipleverse?? multiver..
Ahh yes that's it -- A MULTIVERSE!
Or you could have just read the damned summary.
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I'm not fond of calling people morons, but when they make asses of themselves like that, I'm very tempted.
GPP asked not whether the set of several universes can be called a universe; obviously, we call that a multiverse. He asked whether, if those several universes physically interact with each other, can each of those several physically-interacting things rightly be called a "universe", which together compose the multiverse?
Traditionally, part of the definition of the universe is its causal closure and spa
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If it has more than one verse, it's some kind of poetry or a song. If it has an infinite number of verses, it's Vogon poetry.
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Friendly Reminder: Apple, Google, Nintendo and Valve are the for-profit corporations a Slashdotter is permitted to like.
Since when is it acceptable to post anything even suggesting you like Apple? Apparently, I missed that memo.
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Or Goo-"don't be evil? yeah right"-gle, for that matter?
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Or Val-"Portal 2 was overrated and Episode 3 is the new Duke Nukem Forever, only DNF actually shipped"-ve?
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Re:Collision? (Score:4, Insightful)
If universes can physically interact with each other, can each really be called a "Universe"?
If they could not physically interact, what would be the point? If something can't be seen, measured, felt, etc then how can it even be said to exist?
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Yes. Have you ever seen a circumcised atom?
This... (Score:2)
This is why I love Physics. The mere fact that we are considering such a colossal hypothesis and devise a method to verify/falsify it by observing reality...
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This is why I love Physics. The mere fact that we are considering such a colossal hypothesis and devise a method to verify/falsify it BY OBSERVING REALITY!
FTFY
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This is why I love Physics. The mere fact that we are considering such a colossal hypothesis and devise a method to verify/falsify it BY OBSERVING REALITY!
FTFY
Sorry, I have a sore throat. ;)
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Re:This... (Score:5, Informative)
I was expecting this kind of comment. You fell into my trap! Muahahaha! :)
Now, seriously, Karl Popper is a late guest in the show. There are two lines of thought, verificationism and falsationism (Popper and its following). The first one states that you must verify your hypothesis with experiments. Those experiments, though, are nothing more than steps in an endless stair of confirmation. Popper said that scientists should aim for the opposite, that is, you can't verify but you can falsify, and Science's objective (with capital "s") should be to keep trying to falsify hypothesis.
It doesn't matter in the end with which epistemological view you adhere, as they are two sides of the same coin. If you are a verificationist, you keep doing experiments that will verify your hypothesis until you find one that doesn't. If you are a falsationist, you keep doing experiments that will falsify your hypotesis while you wait for the one that succeed in doing that. Either way, you keep on testing: that is the essence of the scientific knowledge.
How long until multinet? (Score:2)
Hopefully we can pick up some new television channels and radio stations. I'm getting pretty bored with the universe our universe offers.
Or multinet. Think of the porn!
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Hopefully we can pick up some new television channels and radio stations. I'm getting pretty bored with the universe our universe offers.
Or multinet. Think of the porn!
...but we already live the universe that has all the porn.
Rule 34 is just a myth else where.
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Actually, you were five minutes behind.
It would be kind of hard to send that message in five minutes in this universe. Perhaps the speed of light is different where you come from.
I think you meant five million years behind--but I'll excuse you, the keys are like right next to each other.
Multiverse "pressure" (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, my 11-year-old son said something kind of interesting last night, on this subject. This month's article in Scientific American is about multiverse theories, and he asked me (paraphrase), "If the universe is contained among a bunch of other universes, and the universe is expanding, isn't it possible that the other universes are exerting pressure on our universe as it's expanding?"
I'd never really thought about that before, and it may be an unanswerable question (along the lines of, "what are the multiverses contain in"), but I thought that was an intriguing thought.
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Hidden Reality, by Brian Greene (Score:2)
And the answer is... (Score:2)
They should be able to say more once they get new data from the Planck satellite.
Our universe banged others? (Score:2)
Only One Plausible Explanation (Score:2)
Pls Define... (Score:2)
"...trapped in the muck like footprints, of where our universe banged into others."
This may be true, depending on the definitions of the (perhaps metaphorically used) words "trapped", "muck", "where", "universe", and "banged".
Also, wasn't the same phenomenon cited as evidence of structure that existed "before" the big bang by someone else recently? Roger Penrose?
Original articles, please (Score:2)
Why doesn't the submitter link to the actual articles? Why don't the editors make sure those links are included before the story is posted? Why is there at all a link to ScienceBlog? All relevant information the blog post contains would fit into a Slashdot summary.
Does anyone have the links to the papers so we can actually read about this work?
A possible flaw in the hypothesis. (Score:2)
This assumes the leading edge of the matter and radiation in the universe have reached the surface of this "bubble" and that the bubble isn't expanding in and of itself ahead of any sort of detectable edge.
Think "bubble inside a bubble".
The inner bubble represents the known universe, background radiation, matter, etc. The outer bubble represents the actual edge of our universe.
Now imagine being able to put a needle through the outer bubble and into the inner one, then introduce more air. The inner bubble
The old lady was right (Score:2)
Prime (Score:2)
Nobody has realized that the collision patterns might be from Superboy-Prime punching the walls of reality [tumblr.com]?
First there was nothing... (Score:2)
...then it exploded.
Ha, (Score:2)
DO NOT CLICK (Score:3)
goatse
Re:BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe you just don't what what you're talking about, and think that playing a public game of semantics is a suitable replacement for knowledge.
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I don't think you listened to what he said, and your snarky and denigrating remarks are not constructive to a really interesting conversation we could all be having. This is most certainly not an issue of semantics.
The multiverse theory, as I have always understood it, posits that for every possible "choice", universes are created to express each on the possibilities, or "choices". This could be purely causality, or could be free will. Who really knows.
However, and this is not semantics, a universe is gen
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That's a common science fiction/fantasy theme (and so far as I know, nothing more) and not at all what they're talking about.
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That's a common science fiction/fantasy theme (and so far as I know, nothing more) and not at all what they're talking about.
I read the summary again, and you're right. They are specifically redefining the multiverse and then proposing a test. However, the multiverse is not a common science fiction/fantasy theme. It is used in science fiction, but first appeared in "religion". It's quite old. Although it started more philosophically, in recent times it did change its name to the many-worlds theory and is also known as the quantum multiverse theory.
Most people just say multiverse and don't add the quantum.
So I am speaking of
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The multiverse theory, as I have always understood it, posits that for every possible "choice", universes are created to express each on the possibilities, or "choices".
Here's how you can test that theory. It's the Schrödinger's cat experiment, except YOU are the cat. If there are multiple universes where each possible outcome occurs, then now half of them have you alive and half have you dead. Of course, *you* will only perceive the alive half. Repeat until you reach your desired level of certainty. Of course, that doesn't really prove much for most copies of the rest of us, since we'll all mainly be in universes where you are quite dead.
(Author not responsible
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Evidently who is not a smart ass has already thought of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality [wikipedia.org]
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The point is that it isn't our space. That two manifolds can influence each other in some way doesn't somehow make them the same manifold, any more than two balloons colliding suddenly share the same internal structure.
This is pretty basic cosmological principles here.
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So there.
(See how that works?)
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Since the society you described has never existed, not even in the pre-Civil War United States, would you care to describe how you could possibly describe how your ideal society isn't the broken one?
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The problem was that the Jeffersonian-Madisonian state tore itself to pieces and Lincoln came along and had to redefine it so there still would be a United States. Look at pictures of the Civil War. There's your fucking Libertarian state, lying their in ruins.
Libertarianism doesn't work.
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Wow, you're just making it up now. Typical Libertarian. Go back to jerking off to pictures of Ron Paul, and leave serious historical and economic analysis to people who don't treat politics and economics like some sort of a religious statement.
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Well of course you wish that, because you're a selfish sociopath like all your fellow Libertarians. Well, actually, most of them are just plain stupid. I haven't decided whether you're clinically dangerous or just clinically moronic.
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The economy was built in all sorts of ways. One of the chief ways from WWII onward was via defense contractors.
Oh, I forgot, you're the chronically confused halfwit who probably thinks the taxpayer didn't pay for the invention of such critical items like the Internet.
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Multiverses are considered one viable interpretation of quantum mechanics, why pass up a chance to check it out? Next to cost of another resource or power war against a brown-peopled non-christian country, the cost will be minuscule and no one will get hurt.
Because they aren't really checking it out. No matter what they find, it will neither confirm nor deny the plausibility of the multiverse interpretation. If they do find the distortion in CMB they are looking for, it only means that the multiverse hypothesis is one possible explanation for it. If they don't, it doesn't prove that the multiverse hypothesis is wrong. It isn't even really evidence of it. They may as well say they are trying to prove that god exists by looking at the indentations in the CMB whe
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mumbo jumbo... OK, clearly you are a troll or an ignorant knuckle dragger.
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I am going to make the assumption that you are living in the US (based on your other posts.)
Considering that the summary says that "UK Physicists" are researching this, my guess is that neither you nor I are paying for this as a US taxpayer.
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We are looking at the dents on the inside surface of our universe made by something that bumped into it from outside, way in the past.
And our laws of physics hold only inside our universe, and only after a certain time since the Big Bang. Before that time, anything could have happened. This is one hypothesis we can check.
My question is how they're supposed to tell what caused a particular distortion in the background radiation. A quick look at the COBE plot [chaos.org.uk] shows it to be a swiss cheese. So how do you d
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The universe started as a point and is expanding. The event horizon of this expansion is the inside surface. We can't see it, but we can see just inside of it. The radiation reaching us from it was sent to us at an instant after the big bang, and has taken this long to get here, even though we started out less than a femtometer away from it.
At least, that's the theory. There's another theory that you can have it your way at Burger King. Both are testable.
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This can't be right, how can we, "inside" our own universe observe anything else "outside"our universe? Wouldn't anything we observe withing our universe be our universe?
We can't, and it would.
What we would hypothetically be observing is the effect, in our universe, of interactions with another universe. Things in our universe from which we would infer the existence of others.
It is certainly possible that there are interactions between these universes that are not possible within them, and vice versa. For example we live within a (nominally) 4-dimensional space-time. This bubble of space time could interact in a higher dimension with other bubbles of space-time, having a
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Perhaps a simple analogy is the search for extrasolar planets.
Although recently some have been imaged directly, the way to usually find them is not to look for the planets themselves.. they tend to be too dim and small ..but to look for the effect they have on their nearby star(s). Be it a periodic shifting in the star's velocity relative to Earth or a periodic dimming of its apparent output, etc.
So we don't observe the planet directly, but by looking for the signs we'd expect a planet to have on something
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Unfortunately, a planet is too "normal" to be of any use as an explanatory device in situations like this. I've tried using the example of inferring the existence of exoplanets from gravitational evidence to explain how we infer the existence of dark matter from gravitational evidence. But dark matter is "too weird", so even though it's relying on the same force, one is perfectly acceptable, but the other must just mean that our understanding of gravity is wrong.
A multiverse, inferred from evidence in the
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Person who doesn't understand something monumentally complex claims it can't be true, news at 11.
Stop taking the literal mean of the words which are just an abstract way to explain something incredible complex. If they jsut laid out the math and said 'there you do, that's why' would understand it?
OTOH, anyone who thinks that video in correct probably can't think more then two steps anyways.
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There is nothing testable about any multiverse hypothesis and nothing being measured here. The.CMB's variability is indistinguishable from noise.
I hypothesize that the multiverse exists, and that the portion of it that is that portion of our universe which I observe will continue to exist even if I type squee.
squee.
Oh sh--
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That's what she said. You mom says that "she" says a lot too though. She also says "hi".
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Two arbitrary planes in a 3D space will meet with probability 1.0.
Two arbitrary N-1 dimensional slices through an N dimensional space will meet with probability 1.0.
But of course, universes are not lines, planes, or anything of the sort. And the question is not, "Will two arbitrary universes collide," but rather, "What is the average number of collisions a universe will experience with the infinite other universes in the multiverse?"
So
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y=1
y=2
Huh?
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Try reading just two more sentences...
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Two arbitrary lines in a 2D plane will meet with probability 1.0.
Two arbitrary lines in 3D space will meet with probability 0.0.
(In each case, the exceptions are vanishingly few relative to the norm.)
Of course, given one arbitrary line in 3D space there are an infinite number of (non-arbitrary) lines that intersect it.
I guess it all depends on your arbitrariness.
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From a mathematical point of view, this isn't actually true (although it is intuitive). The probability that two arbitrary lines in 2D space will meet is undefined. Going back to basics, there are an unbounded number of possible lines. Without loss of generality, select y=0. (We don't lose generality becaus
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Ah, I see it. You're quite right, and I see the point. Using pure set cardinality leaves the probability undefined, but this gives a workaround. I'd have some difficult reading to prove whether the original assertion is correct under measure theory, but I suspect it is.
And here's the poison pill to demonstrate how far I missed the boat: the same arguments I used apply to something as simple as picking a number x from [0,2] and computing the probability that x < 1. Obviously that's 0.5, but the techni
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You first state 1D-2D; then 1D-3D, and then extrapolate to 3D-nD, having not modified the primary factor before.
Two arbitrary 2D objects in 3D space will also meet with a probability vanishingly close to 1.0. The same goes, then - if you *can* extrapolate that without knowing all the rules in place in higher dimensions - that two 3D objects will meet in 4D, and two 4D objects will meet in 5D; et cetera.
Thus, if our nD universe is encapsulated in an n+1D multiverse, they will certainly meet, according to you
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cubes are not the projection of planes in 3d space
regards.
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Two arbitrary cubes in 4D space will meet with probability 1.0.
Two arbitrary cubes don't necessary intersect even in 3D space, why the hell would they in 4D space? The word you are looking for is not "cube" -- more like "3 dimensional subspace."
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My favorite part is where the guy is playing with a balloon inside a dodecahedron, which probably took significant time to assemble, and he's all like "we looked for these circles, and uh, we didn't find any." In my head, I imagine him thinking to himself, "did I just get punked?"
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Others worked on more pressing problems, like preventing catastrophic global warming, trying to avoiding using the remaining oil by fighting over it and making sure we are all fed.
Sure, let's throw astrophysicists at economic problems. That's not inefficient and dumb at all. But, wait, we can head that problem off by forcing anyone who wants to be an astrophysicist to instead study something more practical. It's not like exploring esoteric physics has ever resulted in practical applications and the advancement of human well-being. /SARCASM
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What if we're living inside the mind of a supercomputer right now?