The multiverse is huge in pop culture right now — but what is it, and does it really exist?

[Admin]

Whether you need a new villain or an old Spider-Man, your sci-fi movie will sound more scientifically respectable if you use the word multiverse.

The multiverse is huge in pop culture right now — but what is it, and does it really exist? : Read more

 

[rod]

Here are some interesting items I observed in this report. 1. "How did our universe get the right mix of ingredients? Perhaps we won the cosmic lottery. Perhaps, on scales much bigger than what our telescopes can see, other parts of the universe have different building blocks. Our universe is just one of the options a particularly fortunate one — among a multiverse of universes with losing tickets. This is the scientific multiverse: not simply more of our universe, but universes with different fundamental ingredients. Most are dead, but very very rarely, the right combination for life-forms comes up."

2. "among a multiverse of universes" - presently these are not observed like telescopes can see the Galilean moons moving around Jupiter. Other reports indicate there could be 10^500 different universes in the multiverse cosmology model.

3. "Cosmic inflation might make a multiverse. Here's how. According to this idea, most of space is expanding, inflating, doubling in size, moment to moment. Spontaneously and randomly, in small islands, the new energy field converts its energy into ordinary matter with enormously high energies, releasing what we now see as a Big Bang. If these high energies scramble and reset the basic properties of matter, then each island can be thought of as a new universe with different properties. We've made a multiverse."

There is plenty on inflation now on the forums, e.g., Stronger gravity in the early universe may solve a cosmological conundrum, https://forums.space.com/threads/st...rse-may-solve-a-cosmological-conundrum.55758/

4. "So is there a Multiverse? In the cycle of the scientific method, the multiverse is in an exploratory phase. We've got an idea that might explain a few things, if it was true. That makes it worthy of our attention, but it's not quite science yet. We need to find evidence that is more direct, more decisive."

My observation. Multiverse cosmology is not heliocentric certainty astronomy.

5. "but it's not quite science yet." If the multiverse is not science, is it another creation myth about the origin of the universe?

 

[Helio]

The article could have segued into how the multiverse idea fits within the topics of metaphysics or pseudoscience, which would seem appropriate. I always enjoy seeing more written to help define the differences between sciences per the SM and suppositional ideas, which, it's worth noting, are often precursors for hard science later.

The difference is quite easy to understand since understanding the differences between what is objective (based on measurable evidence) versus subjective views is all that is necessary.

What is the objective evidence a multiverse idea offers? I think Greene and others have found some interesting mathematical models that has lead to some specific and interesting possibilities, including the 10^500 number. But math is the language of physics and not actually physics. A modified Tychonic Earth-centered universe can mathematically be demonstrated to be unfalsifiable. GR is about relativity, after all. But this is a gross model of reality. When Lemaitre showed Einstein the original model for what was to become Big Bang, Einstein famously stated to Lemaitre that his math was fine but his physics abominable.

The math models for multiple universes, or even what happens at t=0, are no better than at least one religious model, and I favor the latter.