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Scientists find first evidence that many universes exist
- Udo 16y agoIsn't this really just a variation on the Penrose fallacy that occurred not-so-long ago, probably resulting from an inability to account for the statistical and technical properties of our CMB measurements?
- orblivion 16y agoI really hope this isn't true. I can't begin to imagine the horrors we'd have to accept as part of reality as a consequence.
- vorg 16y agoWhat horrors? Our sun is already one of 100 billion in the Milky Way, and our galaxy one of (is it?) 1 trillion in the 13-billion-year-old observable Universe. It's only a small step to accept our observable Universe is only one of 10 trillion bubbles in the Multiverse.
- me2i81 16y agoWell there's that stupid beard that Spock wears, for one.
- Tycho 16y agoam I the only one always quite surprised that the universe is 'only' 13 billion years old?
- kaffeinecoma 16y agoThat always struck me as odd too, since the Earth itself is ~4.5 billion years old. It just seems odd that our little planet has been around (in some fashion) for a significant portion of the lifetime of the universe.
- Zaak 16y agoIn addition to that, our solar system probably formed from the remains of one or more second-generation stars, so our planet has already been around longer than at least one of its "ancestors".
- yters 16y agoI believe Hindu cosmologies put our universe's lifespan on the order of trillions of years.
- orblivion 16y agoThe fact that the apparent randomness seen in quantum mechanics is actually our traveling down one of many possibilities, each of which manifest of their own right. Which means that, if I reach success in my life, thinking back to the hopeful sorry self in my past, I can no longer say, "to think, that sorry guy became the success he is today". That sorry guy also died of cancer, fell off a cliff, died alone, became a heroin addict, and won the lottery. It means that if we as a race ever successfully end poverty or oppression, there will be infinite other amount of scenarios where it never happened and probably got worse. I could imagine all sorts of horrible possibilities but I won't. I'm just going off of what other people seem to conclude from this theory. I admit it seems a bit juvenile that every conceivable thing is possible. ("Everything you can think of is true" - Tom Waits) There's probably a lot of physical limitations. But I still worry what sorts of horrible scenarios it may allow for. But, I dunno, maybe not all multiple universe theories are the same.
- Qz 16y agoI have a wild and semi-unprovable theory that whenever you feel fear in a life-threatening situation, you are in fact feeling the simultaneous multiple-universe death of your other selves who don't survive the life-threatening situation -- sort of the way identical twins report that they can sense each other's feelings, or know when the other is in danger. It's probably total BS, but it's fun to think about.
- yters 16y agoI think it's cool too, since every possibility has a non-zero probability of occurring, so I can attempt absolutely anything I want, no matter how crazy, and somewhere I will have succeeded. I don't even have to put in any effort. Of course, if the set of possibly horrible things is much larger than that of possibly great things, then yes reality sucks. Given that there are always many more ways things can go wrong than right, I guess reality sucks. So, the end result is I don't even have to do anything and my dreams come true, but that doesn't matter because so do my nightmares, and there are more of them.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
- scottmp10 16y agoIt's turtles all the way down...
- Eliezer 16y agoWe've already got theories which say that the universe is spatially infinite and quantumly branching. One more level of infinity on top of that isn't going to make much of a difference. I suggest you regard all events not part of your decision-theoretic future (those you have no influence over) as part of the generalized past, and ignore them.
- mynameishere 16y agoOne day your kidneys will shut down and poison you. If you can deal with that (or similar) you can deal with the "horrors" of multiple universes.
- thailandstartup 16y agoWith multiple universes, where every possibility is explored, there will always be one where you don't die. Your consciousness might be navigating you into that universe. So even when you're 104 and have only 50% of making it to your next birthday . . somehow you will. Everlasting life, that would be a true horror.
- joe_the_user 16y ago"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", right? How much data would be required to determined which of the googleplex of imaginable alternate universes are the ones which intersected this one?
- davi 16y agogoogolplex; the Googleplex is a place :) (Can't resist pedantry in this case; my grandfather taught me what a googol and a googolplex are way back in the dark ages and I have some affection for the terms)
- thangalin 16y agoExtraordinary claims require sufficient empirical evidence as proof; proof that need not be extraordinary.
- davidj 16y agoanother article trying to perpetuate the big bang myth by fitting evidence around a predetermined conclusion. We really need to abandon the big bang theory and just admit we just don't know yet instead of fitting evidence to our conclusion. If the paper concludes no single bang, and no singular event, then no big bang happened.
- jerf 16y agoBig Bang is currently accepted to the extent that it is because it has managed to fit the facts best. Isolated suggestions here and there will explain this bit better or explain that bit better and it makes for a great New Scientist article every last freaking time somebody somewhere puts a pre-pre-print up on arxiv, but nobody has actually put together a theory that explains the totality better than the current standard theory. Everybody already knows that it's broken, that's not news. And it takes more than "one paper" to determine the matter either way, I can pretty much find "one paper" that'll say just about anything. We know we don't know. That's not news. Nobody has anything better yet. But that's hardly an excuse to just throw our hands up and "abandon" what is currently the best we've got. In other news, everybody knows the Standard Model of particle physics has to be broken; it is accepted not because it is right but because nobody has actually come up with anything uniformly better.
- away 16y agoScientists call it the Big Bang Theory. And in Science, the word "theory" is supposed to basically be the equivalent of a proven phenomenon. Scientists do not admit that the Big Bang theory is broken. They really believe that everything in the universe came from nothing even though it violates everything in cause-and-effect.
- ceejayoz 16y agoGo back far enough and everything boils down to "something from nothing" or "something was always there". Both options violate everything in cause-and-effect. We either don't exist - demonstrably false - or the universe's start doesn't necessarily abide by cause-and-effect as we humans understand it.
- jfb 16y agoI read this headline as "Scientists find first evidence that many universities exist". Vacation clearly cannot come fast enough.
- nkassis 16y agoThis would make for an epic onion article ;p
- caf 16y agoStill, the scientists acknowledge that it is rather easy to find a variety of statistically unlikely properties in a large dataset like the CMB One is reminded of "Assassinations Foretold in Moby Dick!" as an example of this error (http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html)
- gphil 16y agoYes, I think this comment gets it exactly. This kind of research always bothers me because it starts with narratives like the Big Bang and parallel universes and then (ab)uses the data to corroborate them. The problem is that, on a multiversal scale, we really have only one observable data point (our universe) so just about any cognitive model that we can come up with can be used to explain its idiosyncrasies with equal validity. This result is very different from actually observing many universes bumping into each other, or multiple universes starting from a big bang. It's more like seeing a coin come up heads once, and then claiming that the model "coins always come up heads" is the best model describing that situation.
- brianwillis 16y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the two-slit experiment the "first" evidence that other universes exist?
- maeon3 16y agoMy head just exploded, that explains everything! The collapse of the electron wave function is a symptom of something causing the electron to stop behaving as a multidimensional particle and begin behaving as a single dimensional particle. woah.
- brianwillis 16y agoI'm not sure if you're making fun of me, or your response is just way over my head.
- Natsu 16y ago> I'm not sure if you're making fun of me, or your response is just way over my head. Honestly, cosmology is like that for most people.
- richardw 16y agoNo, there are a few interpretations for quantum trickery, that being just one. If multiple universes did exist, it still wouldn't be the same as what that QM interpretation is claiming. It's claiming a new universe pops up pretty much every time some particle isn't sure where it wants to be. Terrible waste of energy and effort, IMO. Occam's razor would have a field day.
- retrogradeorbit 16y agoCopenhagen interpretation has my vote.