Good article on the multiverse

Orion Nebula/pomona.edu

I love the multiverse. Actually, that's putting it mildly: I drool over the concept. An infinite number of universes! How can you not like something like that? And it's probably true -- that's the zinger.

Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance is a celebrated scientist and blogger who has a short, sweet article over at Discovery about one concept of the multiverse. He's a real-life scientist and not a lightweight. The guy works at the Large Hadron Collider. Need I say more?

He's also conservative in some ways. I say this after reading his blog for over a year and reading his latest book. For instance, Carroll never pushes the idea of a multiverse created through the constant splitting of reality that occurs each and every time a human makes a decision to do this rather than that. (This is actually a semi-popular idea among some scientists. It's always been a bit much for me.)

That's far out for Carroll, or so I believe based on his writings. I say this to indicate that he's not a wild-eyed theorist. He's solid. That said, there are some wild ideas are almost certainly true. The article linked above is about one of them: a kind of multiverse that is almost surely real.

Remember the Star Trek Next Generation episode where an alien tweaked the Enterprise's motor and shot it billions of light years away? The universe they landed in looked nothing like ours; space itself was different. This is the sort of multiverse Sean Carroll thinks might be real. Enjoy the article if you're so inclined. It's a good primer for people unfamiliar with the concept of a multiverse.