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Parallel Universes Are Real
It's in Scientific American, it must be true. This month's cover story:
Parallel Universes.
"The simplest and most popular cosmological model today predicts that you have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the 1028 meters from here." That number's a lot bigger than 10 to the 101.42 meters, which are the farthest observable objects in what we call our universe. And anyway, twin or not, anyone outside my light-cone is dead to me. That's just a rule I have. If you're skeptical of the multiverse, go read our discussion of a similar article from
two days ago.
That is 10 to the 10 to the 1.42, which is significantly longer.
What is the shortest sig that cannot be expressed in fewer than 20 words?
It goes like this. There are approximately 10^120 particle positions (the smallest quantized unit of space) in the observable universe (and there are 10^90 particles in the universe). Assuming each "particle position" is a boolean (either a particle is there or it's not), there are 2^10^120 possible observable universes (a sphere of space 40 billion light-years across). Now, we have cosmological evidence that the entire universe goes on forever ... so using simple math we can derive a much larger sphere encompassing so many universes that, at some point, all possible particle position combinations are exhausted and there MUST be another 40-billion-light-years-across universe that is exactly the same as the one we currently inhabit. The distance they've calculated is around 10^42 meters. So, that far away, there should be an exact replicate of you, reading this exact post at this exact same instance, and modding it up as Informative :-)
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Yeah....it's gotten worse, but not quite bad enough to be called sensationalist crap like Omni. But it's certainly awful enough to have made me switch to American Scientist. The Sigma Xi publication delivers some kick-ass articles on all facets of scientific research, focusing mainly (in my view) on physics, math, and meta-research on scientific methods with some astronomy and life sciences thrown in. Lots of CS, too. Comes highly recommended despite its US-centric name.