Alan Guth, the discoverer of cosmic inflation, gave a talk at MIT on November 1, which convinced me, a natural skeptic about these issues, that the multiverse may very well exist. Two routes to the multiverse were never to my liking.
One is "Many Worlds," Hugh Everett IIIs idea that quantum events whose wave functions seem to "collapse" in our world to yield specific measurements actually never collapse but realize all other characteristics implicit in their wave functions in "other universes." Every time something happens here--of all the very large number of possibilities--all the rest of them happen in other universes.
The second such approach comes from string theory, where the equations make mathematical "sense" in more than 4--possible 10 or 11--dimensions, so along these "curled-up" dimensions that string theorists talk about, other universes flourish.
Photo Credit: NAS
One is "Many Worlds," Hugh Everett IIIs idea that quantum events whose wave functions seem to "collapse" in our world to yield specific measurements actually never collapse but realize all other characteristics implicit in their wave functions in "other universes." Every time something happens here--of all the very large number of possibilities--all the rest of them happen in other universes.
The second such approach comes from string theory, where the equations make mathematical "sense" in more than 4--possible 10 or 11--dimensions, so along these "curled-up" dimensions that string theorists talk about, other universes flourish.
Photo Credit: NAS
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