Multiverse

There is a great article in Discover Magazine this month about cosmic collisions (10/09). The article talks about how our universe might be one of billions of other universes with different properties and cosmological constants. If our Universe collides with another the one with the lower cosmological constant wins, while the other is destroyed... as if it ran into a wall at the speed of light.

I started the idea of the multiverse and found some amazing stuff...

In his newest book, Just Six Numbers, Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, argues that six numbers underlie the fundamental physical properties of the universe.

If the number were only a mite smaller— .006 instead of .007— a proton could not bond to a neutron, and the universe would consist only of hydrogen. No chemistry, no life. And if it were slightly larger, just .008, fusion would be so ready and rapid that no hydrogen would have survived from the Big Bang. No solar systems, no life. The requisite number perches, precariously, preciously, between .006 and .008. And that's just one of Rees's six numbers. If you toss in the other five, life and the structure of the universe as we know it become unlikely to an absurd degree. Astronomer Hugh Ross has compared the state of affairs to "the possibility of a Boeing 747 aircraft being completely assembled as a result of a tornado striking a junkyard."

Faced with such overwhelming improbability, cosmologists have offered up several possible explanations. The simplest is the so-called brute fact argument. "A person can just say: 'That's the way the numbers are. If they were not that way, we would not be here to wonder about it,' " says Rees. "Many scientists are satisfied with that." Typical of this breed is Theodore Drange, a professor of philosophy at the University of West Virginia, who claims it is nonsensical to get worked up about the idea that our life-friendly universe is "one of a kind." As Drange puts it, "Whatever combination of physical constants may exist, it would be one of a kind."

http://discovermagazine.com/2000/nov/cover/?searchterm=multiverse

Why is There Life?

by Brad Lemley

From the November 2000 issue, published online November 1, 2000

This reminds me of a recurring theme of..

The unbearable lightness of being By Milan Kundera

He goes on to make use of Beethoven's theme of Ess muss sein! or It must be!

To me it does not seem like any of this moves us any closer to a why, as Brad Lemeley's article asks... however, we are hopefully further exploring our understanding of the what.