Multiverse

Multiverse skeptic and mathematician Peter Woit vs. multiverse activistSean Carroll on bending the rules to get the multiverse accepted without conventional evidence: From Not Even Wrong: Beyond Experiment: Why the scientific method may be old hat This week’s New Scientist has an article by Jim Baggott and Daniel Cossins entitled Beyond Experiment: Why the scientific method may be old hat, which deals with the recent controversy over attempts to excuse the failure of string theory by invoking the multiverse. The article (unfortunately behind a paywall) does a good job of describing the nature of the controversy: what do you do when it becomes clear your theory can’t be tested? Do you follow the conventional scientific norms, give up on it Read More ›

The answer to that question will decide what science is. And scientists are asking it now. From Quanta: String theory, the multiverse and other ideas of modern physics are potentially untestable. At a historic meeting in Munich, scientists and philosophers asked: should we trust them anyway? The crisis, as Ellis and Silk tell it, is the wildly speculative nature of modern physics theories, which they say reflects a dangerous departure from the scientific method. Many of today’s theorists — chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis — appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them. Ellis and Silk accused these theorists of Read More ›

Following hard on: Alternate parallel universe found. Maybe, we learn from New Scientist: Light given off by hydrogen shortly after the big bang has left some unexplained bright patches in space. Are they evidence of bumping into another universe? Well, of course. What else could they be? This is New Scientist’s take on the Chary thesis above: Once it starts, inflation never quite stops, so a multitude of universes becomes nearly inevitable. “I would say most versions of inflation in fact lead to eternal inflation, producing a number of pocket universes,” says Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an architect of the theory. Energy hidden in empty space drives inflation, and the amount that’s around could vary from place Read More ›

Maybe not: We might just have found evidence of another universe bumping into planet Earth, a scientist has very tentatively suggested. While mapping the cosmic microwave background – the light left over from the early universe – Ranga-Ram Chary found a mysterious glow. Chary, a researcher at Planck’s US data centre in California, was mapping CMB when he spotted the unexpected glow. In his paper, Spectral Variations of the Sky: Constraints on Alternate Universes, he said that while there is a 30% chance the fluctuations are nothing unusual, there is also the possibility they provide evidence of a multiverse. “It could also possibly be due to the collision of our Universe with an alternate Universe whose baryon to photon ratio Read More ›

Here: Two theorists recently proposed a way to find evidence for an idea famous for being untestable: string theory. It involves looking for particles that were around 14 billion years ago, when a very tiny universe hit a growth spurt that used 15 billion times more energy than a collision in the Large Hadron Collider. Scientists can’t crank the LHC up that high, not even close. But they could possibly observe evidence of these particles through cosmological studies, with the right technological advances. More. All such claim fly in the face of the main point: If everything is true somewhere, tests are meaningless. Tests belong in universes where only some things are true, not a multiverse where everything is. But Read More ›

From New Scientist: Stephen Hawking says he has a way to escape from a black hole What you may not know is that physicists have been arguing for 40 years about what happens to the information about the physical state of those objects once they fall in. Quantum mechanics says that this information cannot be destroyed, but general relativity says it must be – that’s why this argument is known as the information paradox. Now Hawking says this information never makes it inside the black hole in the first place. “I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but on its boundary, the event horizon,” he said today. The Read More ›

From the Independent: Black holes are a passage to another universe, says Stephen Hawking Black holes in fact aren’t as “black” as people thought and could be a way of getting through to an alternative universe. “The existence of alternative histories with black holes suggests this might be possible,” Hawking said, according to a report from Stockholm University. “The hole would need to be large and if it was rotating it might have a passage to another universe. But you couldn’t come back to our universe. So although I’m keen on space flight, I’m not going to try that. More. For some people, it might be just the ticket. Julian Assange, are you listening? The way some people talk about Read More ›

At Not Even Wrong, Columbia mathematician Peter Woit notes, Online media stories with skepticism about the multiverse continue to appear. The latest one is by Shannon Hall at Nautilus, with the title Is it Time to Embrace Unverified Theories? (I think it’s a general rule that the answer to all questions in titles is No). I like one of the comments on the piece, arguing that some speculative physics is best thought of not as science or religion, but as a game. The article he is referring to is here: Is It Time to Embrace Unverified Theories? In the world of modern physics, there is change afoot. Researchers are striving so hard to leap beyond the mostly settled science of Read More ›

From The Scientist : After spending more than a decade developing tools to study patterns in gene sequences, bioinformaticians are now working on programs to analyze epigenomics data. Just a decade ago, epigenetics researchers used classic biochemistry to reveal key modifications involved in the control of gene expression. These days, discoveries in epigenetics are as likely to be made with a computer as they are to rely on freezers full of cells or stacks of petri dishes. Researchers working to understand the intricacies of methylation marks, histone patterns, and chromosome structure must use computational approaches. More. Epigenetics is not going away. It’s getting bigger equipment. See also: Experts: “Epigenetics can drive genetics” As opposed to natural selection acting on random Read More ›

Not at the  Economist, anyway. It’s mid-August and the pop science is in full bloom: Multiversal truths The idea of inflation was proposed in 1979 by Alan Guth. In the years after Dr Guth published his idea Andrei Linde extended it to suggest that the universe emerged from what he called an inflationary field. But if this field can spawn the universe humans see, there is no reason why it cannot spawn others. There is also no reason why the universes so spawned should have the same laws of physics as one another. Indeed, there is quite a good reason why they should not. This reason was worked out a decade or so ago by several physicists, including Leonard Susskind, of Read More ›

The way Darwinism got on it. Including tax-funded textbooks in compulsory public schools and all the rest. At Evolution News & Views, Kirk Durston writes, Science is also advancing our understanding of just how fantastically improbable the origin of life is. Evolutionary biologist, Eugene Koonin, looking at the possibility that life arose through the popular “RNA-world” scenario, calculates that the probability of just RNA replication and translation is 1 chance in 10 with 1,017 zeros after it. Koonin’s solution is to propose an infinite multiverse. With an infinite number of possible universes, the emergence of life will becomes inevitable, no matter how improbable. So the multiverse has become atheism’s “god of the gaps” but some scientists point out that multiverse Read More ›

From a mag called Symmetry, a journal of particle physics: Human history has been a journey toward insignificance. Actually, it hasn’t. It has been a journey toward significance. Current nutters claim we are wrecking the planet. As we’ve gained more knowledge, we’ve had our planet downgraded from the center of the universe to a chunk of rock orbiting an average star in a galaxy that is one among billions. So can anyone point to a single life form off Earth? So it only makes sense that many physicists now believe that even our universe might be just a small piece of a greater whole. In fact, there may be infinitely many universes, bubbling into existence and growing exponentially. It’s a Read More ›

After SpaceX’s “loss of mission.” But are we missing something here? Aldrin, lunar module pilot for Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing mission here: True, the ripple effects from SpaceX’s Falcon 9 booster going boom in the Florida skies are many. But the take-home message given the NASA-private sector bond is one of striving for reliability, safety, but also affordability. Joining me in this view is my longtime friend, Norm Augustine, retired Chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin. “Successes in commercial space transportation are not only important in their own right, they also free NASA to do that which it does best … namely, push the very frontiers of space and knowledge.” So let’s press ahead beyond a failure to future Read More ›

Further to The multiverse: Hi, Nonsense, meet Budget (This Perimeter Institute conference could be a party’s over signal; time to sweep up the streamers and bust balloons, and get back to evidence-based science): Columbia mathematician Peter Woit is following the proceedings and notes, You can follow a lot of what is going on at this conference on Twitter, here. For example, I was glad to hear about this comment from Dimopoulos There is no difference that we know right now … between the story of divine intervention and the multiverse. It’s great to see a conference on fundamental physics where the multiverse is coming in for some appropriate skepticism. Nonsense, meet Prayer Beads. He has a wonderful plan for your Read More ›

Oh and, Budget, meet Rationalization. But you two can talk later. The meeting is starting… From physicsworld.com, we hear that the Perimeter Institute at MIT North (University of Waterloo, Canada) is starting to ask some questions about crackpot cosmology. As Louise Mayor tells us, on site: Right now, top physicists from around the world are arriving in Waterloo, Canada, to attend a unique conference. Christened Convergence, the meeting is the brainchild of Neil Turok, director of thePerimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) in Waterloo, where the event will be based. I spoke to Turok to find out what motivated him to set up this conference, what makes it so special, and what he hopes it will achieve. Turok was fairly Read More ›