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Theoretical physics catches up with ancient philosophy?

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soap bubbles/Timothy Pilgrim

Could there be worse news? From Joe Carmichael at Inverse:

Yasunori Nomura is a theoretical physics professor at University of California, Berkeley. He’s refining both multiverse and string theories, and tells Inverse that he commiserates with the pre-Socratics. “These old Greek scientists must have been doing similar reasonable, educated guessing,” he says. Like those ancient philosophers, even some of Nomura’s peers — contemporary, cutting-edge physicists — criticize his work as too speculative.

“We are saying that there may be some multiple universes,” Nomura says. “And some people say, ‘You cannot go outside the universe — what are you talking about?’ But the methodology of science is always the same. You just make the theories based on what you can measure.” So long as a theory is robust, steeped in evidence, and falsifiable, scientists ought to consider it. Nomura’s work ticks all three boxes.

Beyond that, Nomura considers the multiverse theory intuitive and logical. “We are just one of the eight planets, our solar system is one of the thousands or ten thousands of solar systems in the galaxy, and our galaxy is one of the many, many galaxies,” he says. “Why do you know, in this particular 21st century, that what we think is the universe is it?” Nomura’s equations, though, surpass intuition. And the equations spit out this same crazy idea: there might be more than one universe. More.

But that’s just the trouble, isn’t it? If the end result of multiverse cosmology is basically what someone could have thunk up thousands of years ago as an educated guess, we are nowhere.

See also: Hi, Nonsense. Meet Budget.

Not only is earth one nice planet among many, but our entire universe is lost in a crowd

and

Multiverse cosmology at your fingertips

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Comments
I wonder if the law of noncontradiction holds in only some of those universes.Mung
July 3, 2016
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