Physics in the multiverse

[neutralino]

I stumbled upon this article in the arxiv today, entitled Physics in the multiverse: an introductory review, which might be quite interesting.

The abstract is short and sweet

This brief note, written for non-specialists, aims at drawing an introductive overview of the multiverse issue.

Anyway, I thought this may be of interest to some people here, since it seems to give a nice introduction to this idea of a multiverse. Note that most of the references are to articles that were written and are now encorparated in the textbook "universe or multiverse." These articles are mostly available freely on the arxiv; just google for the index of the book, then search the titles in the arxiv.

I'm not too keen on the multiverse. As explained in the first page of that article, although people say science must be testable, multiverse followers say that the multiverse is testable, in that we can do experiments in our universe and get a statistical answer for the multiverse. However, I don't believe that with a sample size of 1 (we can only measure our universe) there can ever be anything meaningful drawn from such analyses. Furthermore, the anthropic principle is used a fair bit in this sort of thing, which is something that many physicists greatly dislike.

Anyway, have a read, and/or let us know your thoughts on the topic.

[force5]

Are you stating that you disagree with this theory?

If so, you have my vote.

regards; John

[neutralino]

Are you stating that you disagree with this theory?

If so, you have my vote.

regards; John

Yup, you're pretty much correct in your interpretation of my post. However, I didn't want to flat out reject it in a thread opener, since that would probably not encourage much of a response.

I don't entirely disagree with the theory, since I don't know the whole theory to disagree with! That said, I don't find it a very strong theory, and in my opinion it is not at all scientific.

[force5]

I think this solution came about to avoid the issue of a perpetual motion machine and the fact that another alternative was not available at the time.

But, there will be another option in the future. "my prediction".

Thanks for support at this site. Robert is a great guy.

Thanks, John

[dleviwing]

Any universe would function with the same rules of physics as our own. Those rules apply to the macrocosm and the microcosm; NO EXCEPTIONS.

[Graybeard]

Furthermore, the anthropic principle is used a fair bit in this sort of thing, which is something that many physicists greatly dislike.
Anyway, have a read, and/or let us know your thoughts on the topic.

The anthropic principle may be used a fair bit in this sort of thing, but it is not used in this article ... I think you misread it.

Also the article is ambivalent about multiverses. It has no axe to grind one way or the other ... neither for nor against ..

On the whole I thought it was a great article ... Thanks

cool bananas ... greg

[neutralino]

The anthropic principle may be used a fair bit in this sort of thing, but it is not used in this article ... I think you misread it.

Also the article is ambivalent about multiverses. It has no axe to grind one way or the other ... neither for nor against ..

Sure, the anthropic principle isn't used in this article (although it is mentioned on page 2), but that comment was meant to be for the multiverse in general, not for this specific article. Sorry for the confusion.

On the whole I thought it was a great article ... Thanks

cool bananas ... greg

You're welcome. I think it's a good article too, in that it does exactly what it says on the tin!