Ruminations on multiverses (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, June 23, 2015, 20:40 (3440 days ago) @ David Turell

More conjectures with no proof. Endless prattle:-http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/science/humankinds-existentially-lucky-numbers.html?_r=0-"Finally there are followers of a middle path, who seek to prove that the universe is not accidental but inevitable, with its set of defining numbers as constrained and mutually consistent as the solution to a Sudoku puzzle.-"That was the goal of string theory when it rose to prominence three decades ago. The mathematics, with its extra dimensions and pretzel geometries, was so mesmerizing that the theory seemed almost certain to be true — a tightly woven description, when ultimately deciphered, of a universe just like our own.-"Instead, string theory spiraled off in another direction, predicting a whole multitude of other universes, each with a different physics and each unobservable except for our own. Maybe some of the other universes have spawned different kinds of conscious beings, made from something other than atoms and just as puzzled (in some unfathomable equivalent of puzzlement) as we are.-"Or maybe the whole multiverse thing is just an elaborate way of saying that there are endless ways that this Universe (singular and with a capital U) might have unfolded — counterfactual histories, no more real than a hypothetical Earth on which the Mayans ally with the Incas to fight a thermonuclear war against beings on the moon.-"For years now theorists have been torn between those who reject the multiverse as “a cop-out of infinite proportions,” as Natalie Wolchover and Peter Byrne wrote last year in Quanta, and those who insist the idea is too powerful to be wrong, even if there is no way to verify that any of the other universes exist.-"Plenty of multiverse skeptics remain open to some version of string theory, one that doesn't require redefining what counts as real. Maybe, lurking still hidden in the thicket, is a magic equation, showing that this universe is, after all, the only one that can be."