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Originally Posted by worth
Ok, so here's just a general discussion topic I though of while reading a Scientific American article. For some reason, SA has decided to send me articles to get me to purchase a subscription again...I think I had a subscription like 6 years ago...anyway...
The article they sent me was on Parallel Universes. Now this is a subject that interests me a lot. Maybe that's because I watched a lot of Sliders in my day. Anyway, i've read a lot of books on the subject and in reading this article I wondered what others in this thread though of any of the multiverse theories?
The idea that there are an infinite amount of universes is one that has always intrigued me. Where every single possibility for every single atom is experienced. That is God right there.
So what theory do you subscribe to? Being able to empirically test these theories is always the challenge, and perhaps one day we can say for certain that we live in a multiverse, but what's your guess?
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Personally, I think the many worlds hypothesis is kind of silly. Really, a new universe for every quantum event? Where's all the energy come from to create all these new universes? I have no problem with the idea of a multiverse. I kind of like the idea of branes myself, like soap bubble universes. You have these vast bubbles of formless energy out there in the nowhere that have certain properties, such as number of dimensions, energy density, and other very basic properties. As these bubbles float around the nothingness, they come in contact with each other and the point of contact creates a universe at the interface, the properties of which are determined by the properties of the 'energy bubbles' that have interacted to create it. In that sense our whole universe could be alot like what happens when you blow two soap bubbles and they stick together, forming a kind of combined surface. The energy bubbles themselves could provide the source for phenomena such as quatum foam, representing the interaction between the competing surfaces of the bubbles. Similarly, the non uniformity of the universe could be a result of the underlying structure of the bubbles. Even things like inflation could be represented by the idea of two bubbles touching in space, then becoming more and more attracted to each other the closer they get, causing the appearance of inflation as the combined surface of the bubbles gets larger.
I have no idea of how anybody would go about testing that kind of a theory, but it's how I visualize brane theory and thought it sounded like a cool way for things to work. Of course this may seem as whack to people as many worlds seems to me, but hey, it's just a hypothesis. I think it's kind of elegant and simple.