Everybody talks about the multiverse, but nobody does anything about it

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Paraphrasing Twain, everybody talks about the multiverse, but nobody does anything about it.

There's a reason. Light, after all, travels only so fast, and right now its reach is about 13.7 billion light years. So there's no way of knowing what might have come before the Big Bang or what lies beyond its accelerating reach.

Inflationary theory explains the universe we see with precision. But CalTech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, who attended and spoke at IdeaFestival in 2010 on the subject of time, wonders if the addition of string theory to what we know about inflation might yield "pocket universes," each of them ordered by just some of the physical laws made possible by string theory and inflated to 12-dimensional worlds with 7 primary forces, for example, instead of the three dimensions and four forces of energy to which we're accustomed.

In short, string theory predicts that the laws of physics can take on an enormous variety of forms, and inflation can create an infinite number of pocket universes. So the different laws of physics predicted by string theory might not be just hypothetical. They might really be out there somewhere among the countless parts of the multiverse. This is not a situation that cosmologists dreamed up in a flight of fancy; it is something we were led to by trying to solve problems right here in the universe we observe. The question is, now that the multiverse is here, what are we going to do about it?

The answer is not much. Because not all theories can be tested, and the multiverse, while logically consistent, can't yet be tested even if there may be hints in the cosmic microwave background of other possible universes. We are, after all, stuck with the physical laws that obtain in this universe, and the corresponding limits they impose on what we might know.

But that's the part of the scientific fun, according to Carroll. Not all predictions made by science will be accompanied by data; and in this case, the corresponding data may be permanently opaque. Astrophysicist Adam Frank offers a modest counter, wondering whether science can be science without empirical data.

As for what might be done about it, here's a thought: Put in your earbuds at work and listen to the music in the video above. Turn it up. Listen in awe at Lacrimosa, scored to images from the film The Tree of Life. You will be goose-pimpled.

Wayne

Do we still need photojournalists?

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Ron Haviv: There Is a Need for Photojournalists from TakePart on Vimeo.

Watch this very nicely done TakePart video featuring photojournalist Ron Haviv on his craft and why we still need photojournalists - "authorship" - in a media-saturated world.

Wayne

RSA Animate - Will "divided brain" survive?

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Forget Daniel Pink's revenge of the right brain. The right brain has been taken hostage.

In the latest RSA Animate, psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist argues that the divided brain continues to change and physically evolve, but in ways that favors the left brain's rational point of view. That's not a good thing.

If rationality is "grounded in a leap of intuition," then our view and experience of the world, now increasingly dominated as McGilchrist claims by rational processes and by the left hemisphere, becomes ever more constrained and impoverished as a result. Using Gödel's incompleteness theorems, for example, he points out that strict logic ultimately is self-referential and incomplete.

On his view, the world becomes entirely self-consistent, unironic and uninformed by paradox and metaphor. It becomes less meaningful because life is not a set of propositional statements, but a way of being that must be experienced to be known in full.

Check out this interview with McGilchrist at Bookslut for more on this provocative idea. Here is McGilchrist on his move from English teacher to psychiatry, and the links he sees between the two - IdeaFestival fans should find this kind of lateral connection appealing.

"Microbial life on Mars confirmed"

Airing on Wednesday, Oct. 19, "Finding Life Beyond Earth" featured a number of prominent scientists discussing the latest research on the question of life in our star system.

While finding intelligent life may or may not occur in our ongoing canvas of the Milky Way, in just the past ten years the search for simple life has yielded promising leads in our own solar backyard. And, if some suspect, microbial life exists just below the desert soil of Mars, or loiters in the thick carbon atmosphere of Titan, or bathes in the relatively warm liquid water that scientists strongly suspect is beneath the vents on Enceladus, than rather than being alone on this buoy, life, simple life, becomes a common feature of the universe.

Cassini, which has been cruising the Saturn system for the past nearly six years, has passed through the ice water in the geysers, pictured above, that Enceladus sends spaceward. Planetary scientists and astronomers could only suspect that prior to 2005. Think about it for a moment. Similarly, it's only in the past three years that thousands of tons of frozen water, locked in the permanently shadowed polar regions of our lunar companion, have been located. The SUV-sized Curiosity, which has just been buttoned up for flight to the Red Planet, will carry its own chemistry lab. A sample return mission to bring back Martian rocks is in the works.

What I find so gratifying about this time and place in history - this golden age in which we live - is that the curtain on the question, "are we alone?" may indeed be pulled back. Writing about being a physicist, the string theorist Brian Greene - and a former IdeaFestival presenter, by the way - says that in his work, "promising ideas lead, more often than not, nowhere."

As a professional physicist, I have long since realized that there was much naïveté in my high school infatuation with physics. Physicists generally do not spend their working days contemplating flowers in a state of cosmic awe. Instead, we devote much of our time to grappling with complex mathematical equations scrawled across well-scored chalkboards. Progress can be slow. Promising ideas, more often than not, lead nowhere. That’s the nature of scientific research.

Yet, even during periods of minimal progress, I’ve found that the effort spent puzzling and calculating has only made me feel a closer connection to the cosmos. I’ve found that you can come to know the universe not only by resolving its mysteries, but also by immersing yourself within them. Answers are great. Answers confirmed by experiment are greater still. But even answers that are ultimately proven wrong represent the result of a deep engagement with the cosmos—an engagement that sheds intense illumination on the questions, and hence on the universe itself. Even when the rock associated with a particular scientific exploration happens to roll back to square one, we nevertheless learn something and our experience of the cosmos is enriched.

Do ideas matter? The promising idea of simple sticky life nearby - energetic, mewling, fertile - may come to nothing. But if it doesn't, and if one day 10 or 20 years hence, the headline "Microbial life on Mars confirmed" appears, will you be changed?

Wayne

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Ira Glass on realizing creative vision: do the work

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The only way to close the gap between what attracted you to painting - or storytelling - or writing - or sculpting - or any creative venture at all, is to fight your way past the first inevitable disappointments.

It will be hard. There are no guarantees. But it's only by doing a "volume of work" that the vision that drew you to that creative endeavor in the first place will have any chance of matching your ambition.

Wayne