Oct 192009
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24239/
One question that then arises is how many universes are there. That may sound like the sort of quantity that is inherently unknowable but Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin at Stanford University in California have worked out an answer, of sorts.
How many universes? The number might be somewhat greater than the “one-two-three-many” conception of numbers that much of mankind has.
9 Responses to “So how many universes are there, anyway…”
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The question I have is would physical laws be the same in all of them? I have a difficult time wrapping my brain around the idea that somewhere Pi=2 for instance.
Yeah, that’s the idea. Not so much that Pi=2 instead of 3.14159……,
but that g _isn’t_ 9.8 m/s squared………
> somewhere Pi=2 for instance.
Many long years ago, when I had a sci-fi muse, I worked on but did not finish a story where some people were trying to wrap their heads around areas of space that had not three spatial dimensions, but square-root-2 or pi dimensions.
The really troubling thing would be if the total e-folded universes were to be numbered as 6-to-the-sixth-to-the-sixth power. Of course, then Jubal or Lazarus would paradoctor the paradox….
Robin – g only equals 9.81 m/s^2 on Earth. It has different values depending on the masses in your vicinity (why Neil and Buzz bounced around so much on the moon). OTOH, having a different value for Newton’s gravitational constant G = 6.67*10^-11 is a perfectly valid speculation 🙂
Didn’t I see this on Futurama? Is there really a 420 Universe?
Brianna, you’re right of course, that’s what I was trying to say………
been a very long time since I studied physics……..
Wow, all that money for educations and they end up plagiarizing Robert Heinlein. Too funny!
Turtles all the way down, I reckon.
Jim