 |
| Richard Dawkins |
Big Bang Discovery Opens Doors to the "Multiverse"
Gravitational waves rippling through the aftermath of the cosmic fireball, physicists suggest, point to us inhabiting a multiverse, a universe filled with many universes. (See: "Big Bang's 'Smoking Gun' Confirms Early Universe's Exponential Growth.")
That's because those gravitational wave results point to a particularly prolific and potent kind of "inflation" of the early universe, an exponential expansion of the dimensions of space to many times the size of our own cosmos in the first fraction of a second of the Big Bang, some 13.82 billion years ago.
"In most models, if you have inflation, then you have a multiverse," said Stanford physicist Andrei Linde. Linde, one of cosmological inflation's inventors, spoke on Monday at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics event where the BICEP2 astrophysics team unveiled the gravitational wave results.
More here: Alan Guth, Waiting For The Big Bang.
I see the point of the Dawkins quote, but being basically an optimist about the human future, I don't think it's one of his better points. All of the galaxy will be ours, someday.
ReplyDeleteWe may some day "own" this galaxy, but that still leaves 100's of billions of other galaxies out there...and that doesn't include the possibility of other universes.
ReplyDelete