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Troll_Bait
Joined: 04 Jan 2006
Location: [T]eaching experience doesn't matter much. -Lee Young-chan (pictured)
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 Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:20 am Post subject: Do parallel universes, dopplegangers, etc., exist? |
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http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/071230/entertainment/science_astronomy_cosmology_film_books_entertainment
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Stranger that fiction: parallel universes beguile science
Is the universe -- correction: "our" universe -- no more than a speck of cosmic dust amid an infinite number of parallel worlds?
A staple of mind-bending science fiction, the possibility of multiple universes has long intrigued hard-nosed physicists, mathematicians and cosmologists too.
We may not be able -- as least not yet -- to prove they exist, many serious scientists say, but there are plenty of reasons to think that parallel dimensions are more than figments of eggheaded imagination.
The specter of shadow worlds has been thrown into relief by the December release of "The Golden Compass," a Hollywood blockbuster adapted from the first volume of Philip Pullman's classic sci-fi trilogy, "His Dark Materials".
In the film, an orphaned girl living in an alternate universe goes on a quest, accompanied by an animal manifestation of her soul, to rescue kidnapped children and discover the secret of a contaminating dust said to be leaking from a parallel realm.
Talking bears and magic dust aside, the basic premise of Pullman's fantasy is not beyond the scientific pale.
"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.
Things get even stranger when one brings the often counter-intuitive laws of quantum physics into the picture, these experts say.
In a landmark paper published in 1957 while he was still a graduate student at Princeton University, mathematician Hugh Everett showed how quantum theory predicts that a single classical reality should gradually split into separate but simultaneously existing realms.
"This is simply a way of trusting strictly the fundamental equations of quantum mechanics," says Barrau. "The worlds are not spatially separated, but exist as kinds of 'parallel' universes."
The borderline between physics and metaphysics is not defined by whether an entity can be observed, but whether it is testable, pointed out Tegmark.
There are many phenomena -- black holes, curved space, the slowing of time at high speeds, even a round and rotating Earth -- that were once rejected as scientific heresy before being proven through experimentation, even if some remain beyond the grasp of observation, he said.
He concluded that it was becoming increasingly clear that multiverse models grounded in modern physics could be empirically testable, predictive and disprovable. |
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RACETRAITOR
Joined: 24 Oct 2005
Location: Seoul, South Korea
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| Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 4:41 am Post subject: |
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| Asking scientists questions like this is as fruitful as asking Jesus' disciples what it's like on the Moon. |
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cunning_stunt
Joined: 16 Dec 2007
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| Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 6:29 am Post subject: |
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There is very strong evidence for parallel universes . There is a lot of behaviour on the quantum level that can only be explained through the existance of them . It's not "airy fairy" science fiction .
There doesn't remain a serious version of trying to explain our world today that doesn't propose on some level that there exist parallel universes . Although the question of what you mean by "parallel" universes may differ significantly ...but that's just semantics . |
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seoulunitarian
Joined: 06 Jul 2004
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| Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 2:48 pm Post subject: re: |
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So I'm still married in another universe? 
But at least I have no debt in another one 
Peace |
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mindmetoo
Joined: 02 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 3:03 pm Post subject: |
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| I quite like the idea of branes, universes all floating around and bumping into each other and creating new ones, like our own. |
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crusher_of_heads
Joined: 23 Feb 2007
Location: kimbop and kimchi for kimberly!!!!
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| Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 3:20 pm Post subject: |
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| The sentiment [LITERAL, not satirical] of William Shatner's "It's just a TV show" answers your question. |
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cunning_stunt
Joined: 16 Dec 2007
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| Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 9:24 pm Post subject: |
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| I quite like the idea of branes, universes all floating around and bumping into each other and creating new ones, like our own. |
M-thoery . Interesting stuff .
Most people still have their heads up their bums and are invested in 19th century causation fixated, deterministic, reductionistic physics , which has really run it's course and offers no new or interesting insights into the world and the human condition . As we go further down this path the universe becomes stranger and stranger and nothing like we observe ...the implications for the human experience are massive , but we can't explore them until we can get rid of the shackles the observable world has on our consciousness ....and the first hurdle is the notion that all that exists is testable , observable and falsifiable within space/time as experienced in the third dimension , which belittles the whole experience and nature of the universe .
First we had the dogma of the church which alientated us from being fully sentient of the nature of the universe...and now the have the dogma of physics which tells us that nothing exists beyond that which we can observe . Both are outdated and wrong . For the thinker out there the school of cosmology is truly starting to touch on something profound in regards to the space we live in which can enrich our experience of the world . |
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Justin Hale
Joined: 24 Nov 2007
Location: the Straight Talk Express
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| Posted: Mon Jan 07, 2008 10:24 pm Post subject: |
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| the article wrote: |
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.
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I find the probability of Justin2, writing on Daves2, on Earth2, in Solar System2, in Milky Way2 - even given an infinitely large universe, or multiverse (and therefore limitless possibility) - incredibly remote. Just because space is incredibly big, I see no reason to start believing in baloney like that. However, the likelihood of billions or even trillions of planets and satelites out there with complex creatures on them is very high. |
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cbclark4
Joined: 20 Aug 2006
Location: Masan
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| Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 12:37 am Post subject: |
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I believe you will find that there are only
10,314,424,798,490,535,546,171,949,056
Universes.
It was either Lazarus Long or Jacob Burroughs
who discovered the exact number? |
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