Making Space for Time – Physicists meet to puzzle out why time flows one way. Scott Dodd. Scientific American, January 2008 p 26,27,28.
This article cites physicists invoking multiverses to explain high order in the early cosmos – and that less order would have prevented universes from surviving or evolving to support intelligent life.
This sounds like evidence for Intelligent Design – and efforts to explain it away. This calls for brilliant astrophysicists and mathematicians to address this controversial evidence from an ID perspective. Note particularly:
—————
“The cosmic microwave background radiation, a remnant of the big bang, shows that 380,000 years after its birth, the universe was filled with hot gas, all evenly distributed and highly ordered. Eventually all the early cosmos underwent inflation and began to coalesce into the disordered universe of stars and atoms we know today.
What remains puzzling, though is why the early universe was so orderly – a condition that physicists consider highly improbable – and what caused it to swell so rapidly. “The arrow-of-time problem, once you get down to the nitty-gritty of it, is, Why was the early universe the way it was?” says Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology. What is more, the cosmos is now going through another period of expansion, with galaxies flying apart at an increasing rate because of a mysterious dark energy. “The fact that it appears that the universe is just going to expand forever and get colder and colder makes [the different conditions] even more striking,” Carroll adds. . . .
“The multiverse concept emerged as one of the more favored – or at least frequently talked about – theories for the strange tidiness of the early cosmos. “If you accept the idea that this might be only one of many possible universes, then that makes it more plausible,” Mersini-Houghton says. Universes that started out more chaotic might not have survived or evolved to support intelligent life. . . .”
See full article: Making Space for Time (by subscription)
Could someone please tell me how the multiverse theory is falsifiable?
If not why are all these high power scientists gathering to discuss a supposedly “non-scientific” theory?
JDH
As far as I understand it, there is no evidence for it, and such universes cannot be detected.
The primary reason to discuss multiverse appears to be to avoid the natural inference of Intelligent Design cause by the astronomically remote probabilities of such evidence occurring by chance.
Craig Rusbult, Ph.D. provides some discussion of the issues of ID vs Multiverse in:
THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE, COSMOLOGY and THEOLOGY, and three explanations for a fine-tuned world
that is “just right” for life. Is the fine tuning due to INTELLIGENT DESIGN and/or A MULTIVERSE?”
For the conventional perspectives, see “Criticisms of Multiverse Theories” under
Multiverse
For philosophical issues involved see:
Multiverse at PhiloWiki
The multiverse thing is as bad as the most inaccurate caricature that the materialists make of ID.
Goddunnit == universe-generating machine dunnit
Carl Sagan, the late David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Studies at Cornell University, in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996):
J
Excellent quote from that iconic skeptic – and founder of the new atheistic cosmological order.
Understand, the fact of fine tuning means that there are only two realistic choices: multiverses or design. Scientific materialism must revert to Goldilocks in order to save itself. But by embracing Goldilocks, it exposes itself as a fairy tale, losing both its credibility and the stranglehold it has enjoyed over the popular imagination for over a century.
The problem is, many people don’t realize just how hard Mainstream Science is embracing Goldilocks and the White Rabbit. That’s where education comes in. As the education level on these subjects goes up, so does the skepticism.
Assuming a multiverse will mark the end of empirical science as we know it. We will never be able to conclude if a particular observation confirms a hypothesis or is just a coincidence expected as a result of all the zillions of other universes.
In other words, not only is the concept of a multiverse unfalsifiable but it makes everything else unfalsifiable.