Peter Woit notes at Not Even Wrong that the latest entertainment along those lines is The Fabric of the Cosmos (November 2 launch), based on Brian Greene’s book of the name. His 2003 popular series promoted string theory, but now that that’s decidedly not so hot, the multiverse limps along on whatever, with Episode 4 fronting the ‘verse.
While the idea remains hotly debated, some of the brightest minds in contemporary physics take very seriously the possibility that our universe is just one among many. How did this notion of multiple universes—a multiverse—arise? Could we ever cross over to other universes, and if we could, might we find another world identical to our own? In this interview, Clifford Johnson, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southern California, offers his perspective on truly otherworldly ideas that science is just beginning to tackle.