http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2014/03/18/bicep2-makes-waves-in-cosmology-now-what/
Because of this last prediction, the BICEP2 discovery should cause dismay among multiverse skeptics – at least in this particular universe. This is because Alex Vilenkin, Andrei Linde, Alan Guth and others have shown that the space that inflation generically creates is not merely infinite, but uniformly filled with matter that forms infinitely many galaxies. This in turn means that no matter how unlikely it is that a galaxy will be indistinguishable from ours, containing someone whose life has so far been identical to yours, the probability is not zero since it clearly happened here. Which means that there must be duplicate copies of you far away in space, and indeed also similar versions of you living out countless variations of your life. Now it’s harder for skeptics to dismiss this by saying “inflation is just a theory” – first they need to come up with another compelling explanation for BICEP2’s gravitational waves.
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Philosophically I always consider Multiverse hypothesis + Many Worlds Interpretation + Anthropic Principle as the most natural and elegant solution and I am enthusiastic about it. So reading this gave me multi-orgasms. However, the rational part of me has been (still is) skeptical. How hard is this evidence anyway? Isn*t the title of this article a bit over the top: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=5907
Contrary to popular belief, you really need a sort of leap of "faith" to be a scientist (a cosmologist to be specific). Even if they say this bold deduction is based on some other well-established scientific theories and whatnot, it still seems far-streched. What makes science distinctive is scientists intend to falsify their bold speculations while others don*t.
Multiverse is still controversial anyway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse
Because of this last prediction, the BICEP2 discovery should cause dismay among multiverse skeptics – at least in this particular universe. This is because Alex Vilenkin, Andrei Linde, Alan Guth and others have shown that the space that inflation generically creates is not merely infinite, but uniformly filled with matter that forms infinitely many galaxies. This in turn means that no matter how unlikely it is that a galaxy will be indistinguishable from ours, containing someone whose life has so far been identical to yours, the probability is not zero since it clearly happened here. Which means that there must be duplicate copies of you far away in space, and indeed also similar versions of you living out countless variations of your life. Now it’s harder for skeptics to dismiss this by saying “inflation is just a theory” – first they need to come up with another compelling explanation for BICEP2’s gravitational waves.
===============================
Philosophically I always consider Multiverse hypothesis + Many Worlds Interpretation + Anthropic Principle as the most natural and elegant solution and I am enthusiastic about it. So reading this gave me multi-orgasms. However, the rational part of me has been (still is) skeptical. How hard is this evidence anyway? Isn*t the title of this article a bit over the top: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=5907
Contrary to popular belief, you really need a sort of leap of "faith" to be a scientist (a cosmologist to be specific). Even if they say this bold deduction is based on some other well-established scientific theories and whatnot, it still seems far-streched. What makes science distinctive is scientists intend to falsify their bold speculations while others don*t.
Multiverse is still controversial anyway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse
