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Stranger Than Fiction:Parallel Universes Beguile Science



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Are we just a spec of cosmic dust in a universe which is one of many? I find this to be fascinatiing, and actually, possible.///// excerpt/////"The idea of multiple universes is more than a fantastic invention -- it appears naturally within several scientific theories, and deserves to be taken seriously," said Aurelien Barrau, a French particle physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), hardly a hotbed of flaky science./////
"The multiverse is no longer a model, it is a consequence of our models," explained Barrau, who recently published an essay for CERN defending the concept./////There are several competing and overlapping theories about parallel universes, but the most basic is based on the simple, if mind-boggling, idea that if the universe is infinite then logically everything that could possible occur has happened or will happen./////Try this on for size: a copy of you living on a planet and in a solar system like ours is reading these words just as you are. Your lives have been carbon copies up to now, but maybe he or she will keep reading even if you don't, says Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at MIT in Boston, Massachusetts./////The existence of such a doppleganger "does not even assume speculative modern physics, merely that space is infinite and rather uniformly filled with matter as indicated by recent astronomical observations," Tegmark concluded in a study of parallel universes published by Cambridge University./////"Your alter ego is simply a prediction of the so-called concordance model of cosmology," he said./////Another type of multiverse arises with the theory of chaotic inflation, which tells us that all these parallel worlds are expanding so rapidly -- stretching further and further in to space -- that they remain out of reach even if one could travel at the speed of light forever./////end of excerpt.
JanforGore

3 responses // Stranger Than Fiction:Parallel Universes Beguile Science

  • http://zero-point.tripod.com/pantheon/Cronos.html
    Then, there is Julian Barbour's fascinating theory about time and the universe, which in a sense complements the idea of parallel universes.
    Vierotchka
  • Interesting. I always wondered, if time is real where does it go when the day is "done." If it is real it would have to go somewhere, no?
    JanforGore
  • http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg1962...
    Here's an interesting article describing how the mystery of dark energy could be explained if we're willing to accept the idea that time itself may actually be slowing down:

    Excerpt:
    IT CAN drag or it can race, but what if time stopped altogether? It now seems that time could disappear from our universe - and we may already have found evidence of its forthcoming demise.

    When astronomers observed a decade ago that supernovae are apparently spreading apart faster as the universe ages, they assumed that something must be causing the expansion of the universe to speed up. But so far, nobody has been able to explain where the "dark energy" causing this acceleration comes from.

    Now José Senovilla at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, and his colleagues have a radical answer - we are fooled into thinking that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, because time itself is slowing down.
    Justin_Gunn

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