So we read in Quanta Magazine:
In the years since their initial meeting, Peiris and Johnson have studied how a collision with another universe in the earliest moments of time would have sent something similar to a shock wave across our universe. They think they may be able to find evidence of such a collision in data from the Planck space telescope, which maps the CMB.
The project might not work, Peiris concedes. It requires not only that we live in a multiverse but also that our universe collided with another in our primal cosmic history. But if physicists succeed, they will have the first improbable evidence of a cosmos beyond our own.
Bethe first to invest your life savings in this.
A friend points to this interview in the same mag last year, with Nobelist and cosmologist David Gross:
Gross characterizes theoretical physics as rife with esoteric speculations, a strange superposition of practical robustness and theoretical confusion. He has problems with the popularizing of “multiverses” and “landscapes” of infinite worlds, which are held up as emblematic of physical reality. Sometimes, he says, science is just plain stuck until new data, or a revolutionary idea, busts the status quo. But he is optimistic: Experience tells him that objects that once could not be directly observed, such as quarks and gluons, can be proven to exist. Someday, perhaps the same will be true for the ideas of strings and branes and the holographic boundaries that foreshadow the future of physics.
Reductionism is not dead, he insists.
Fair enough, but at what point, if any, does one conclude that absence of evidence IS evidence of absence?
If no such point exists, why not? Is the idea too good to pass up even if there is no evidence for it?
See also: Not only is earth one nice planet among many, but our entire universe is lost in a crowd
The multiverse: Where everything turns out to be true, except philosophy and religion
and
As if the multiverse wasn’t bizarre enough …meet Many Worlds
Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista