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Welcome to cosmic catastrophism

universe began its existence 13.7 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since.

xpansion wasn't always at the same rate.

As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws. That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine tuning. It is a consequence predicted by many theories in modern cosmology. If it is true it reduces the strong anthropic principle to the weak one, putting the fine tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat—now the entire observable universe—is just one of many. Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states. Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense the lords of creation.

This morning, two physicists who 50 years ago theorized the existence of this particle, which is responsible for conferring mass to all other known particles in the universe, got the Nobel, the highest prize in science.

left physicists without a clear roadmap of where to go next

No one is sure which of these models, if any, will eventually describe reality

There are, however, others who declare that these claims are not of the Natural Sciences. A knowledge claim in the natural sciences needs to be falsifiable in order to be tested, and claims regarding a multiverse are not falsifiable. This view of science is most closely associated with the philosopher of science Karl Popper and more recently by Neil Degrasse Tyson. Tyson claims that the multiverse theory, and others like it, do not fall under “science”, but “philosophy”. He claims that in physics, for example, a concept constitutes knowledge if it accurately predicts the future and can be tested empirically. Questions about why certain models work can be discussed and debated over dinner, but those ‘why’ questions are not scientific. We can predict where the moon will be at any given time on the strength of our equations, but questions about why those equations work are for philosophers if they cannot be answered with a falsifiable claim.

The natural sciences rely heavily on reason, in particular inductive reasoning. The statement, “all bodies observed so far obey Newton’s law of gravity” has been used to justify a believe in Newton’s law of gravity. Belief structures like this are the backbone of Natural Science, but there are notable philosophers of science who are quick to point out the fallacy of induction. David Hume, for example, questioned the assumption he referred to as the “uniformity of nature”. In short, simply because all observed bodies follow a pattern tell us nothing of unobserved bodies, and the “uniformity of nature” (the belief that nature behaves uniformly) cannot be proven. This brings us to....

Infinity has its own special symbol: ∞. The symbol, sometimes called the lemniscate, was introduced by clergyman and mathematician John Wallis in 1655. The word "lemniscate" comes from the Latin word lemniscus, which means "ribbon," while the word "infinity" comes from the Latin word infinitas, which means "boundless."

Of all Zeno's paradoxes, the most famous is his paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles. In the paradox, a tortoise challenges the Greek hero Achilles to a race, providing the tortoise is given a small head start. The tortoise argues he will win the race because as Achilles catches up to him, the tortoise will have gone a bit further, adding to the distance.

Pi as an Example of Infinity Pi is a number consisting of an infinite number of digits. Jeffrey Coolidge / Getty Images Another good example of infinity is the number π or pi. Mathematicians use a symbol for pi because it's impossible to write the number down. Pi consists of an infinite number of digits. It's often rounded to 3.14 or even 3.14159, yet no matter how many digits you write, it's impossible to get to the end.

science is only a small part of human capability. We gain knowledge of our place in the universe not only from science but also from history, art, and literature. Science is a creative interaction of observation with imagination. “Physics at the Fringe” is what happens when imagination loses touch with observation. Imagination by itself can still enlarge our vision when observation fails. The mythologies of Carter and Velikovsky fail to be science, but they are works of art and high imagining. As William Blake told us long ago, “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”

Over most of the territory of physics, theorists and experimenters are engaged in a common enterprise, and theories are tested rigorously by experiment. The theorists listen to the voice of nature speaking through experimental tools. This was true for the great theorists of the early twentieth century, Einstein and Heisenberg and Schrödinger, whose revolutionary theories of relativity and quantum mechanics were tested by precise experiments and found to fit the facts of nature. The new mathematical abstractions fit the facts, while the old mechanical models did not.

String cosmology is different. String cosmology is a part of theoretical physics that has become detached from experiments. String cosmologists are free to imagine universes and multiverses, guided by intuition and aesthetic judgment alone. Their creations must be logically consistent and mathematically elegant, but they are otherwise unconstrained.

There are only so many ways matter can arrange itself within that infinite universe. Eventually, matter has to repeat itself and arrange itself in similar ways. So if the universe is infinitely large, it is also home to infinite parallel universes.

Greene thinks the key to understanding these multiverses comes from string theory, the area of physics he has studied for the past 25 years. In a nutshell, string theory attempts to reconcile a mathematical conflict between two already accepted ideas in physics: quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity.

Goldstein’s forthcoming book, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, offers insight into the significant—and often invisible—progress that philosophy has made. I spoke with Goldstein about her take on the science vs. philosophy debates, how we can measure philosophy’s advances, and why an understanding of philosophy is critical to our lives today.

One of the things about philosophy is that you don’t have to give up on any other field. Whatever field there is, there’s a corresponding field of philosophy. Philosophy of language, philosophy of politics, philosophy of math. All the things I wanted to know about I could still study within a philosophical framework.

There’s a peer pressure that sets in at a certain age. They so much want to be like everybody else. But what I’ve found is that if you instill this joy of thinking, the sheer intellectual fun, it will survive even the adolescent years and come back in fighting form. It’s empowering.

As the title suggests, Kaku’s latest concern is with what he calls the “holy grail” of all science, the metaphorical “umbilical cord” of our infant universe, whenever it was (or wasn’t) born out of the alleged multiverse. He wanted to write a balanced account of the physics community’s quest to prove string theory — and thus to resolve the messy, imperfect Standard Model of subatomic particles into one elegant theory of everything

This book is like a State of the Union where the union is all of existence.

Right now the known laws of the universe — “the theory of almost everything,” he calls it — can be written on a single sheet of paper. There’s Einstein’s general relativity on one line, and then a couple more for the Standard Model. “The problem is that the two theories hate each other,” he said. “They’re based on different math, different principles. Every time you put them together it blows up in your face. Why should nature be so clumsy?”