On last week’s World Transformed, we talked about parallel universes in their various theoretical permutations. (This piece on Better All the Time walks through the various levels that we discussed on the show.) The discussion followed the news that evidence for universes outside our own may have been found. Thinking over the discussion, a question occurred […]
New findings suggest that our universe is not the only one. It may be one of many, or one of an infinite number of universes. Phil and Stephen discuss the implications. Does it matter if there’s more than universe? If so, how? And why? Check it out.
The Planck space observatory has provided us the clearest and most complete picture of the early universe we have ever had, a composite picture of the background radiation of the entire sky. Interestingly, that picture doesn’t look quite like what we were expecting: Cosmologists studying a map of the universe from data gathered by the […]
Many years Carl Sagan was a guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and the two men somehow got into a conversation about the composition of the universe — what it’s made of. Sagan said something to effect of, “Space is mostly empty space. That’s why we call it ‘space.’” Johnny found that observation […]
We don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s big. I was chatting once with Michael Anissimov and somehow we got onto the subject of parallel universes, and whether we could ever know anything about them. Michael’s answer was no, we can’t. By definition, he explained, a separate universe is an entity we can’t get any […]
We don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s big. I was chatting once with Michael Anissimov and somehow we got onto the subject of parallel universes, and whether we could ever know anything about them. Michael’s answer was no, we can’t. By definition, he explained, a separate universe is an entity we can’t get any […]
Image via Wikipedia If you need to see things in their proper perspective, I recommend this site. (Hat-tip: Michael Darling.) I’m not up to attempting the math, but I wonder if we’re really positioned right in the middle as shown. I think the small end may be smaller than the big end is big (if […]
We noted last week the possibility that our entire universe may just be a low-res 3D rendering of the real 2D universe, which exists out on the boundary of what we normally think of us “the universe.” The hologram that we live in is extremely coarse compared to the boundary universe — our “pixels” are […]
Reader Mike D directs us to this very interesting New Scientist article: Our world may be a giant hologram The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been […]
It’s a great question, just exactly the kind we like to ask: Did our cosmos exist before the big bang? According to the big bounce picture formulated by theoretical physicist Abhay Ashtekar and others, the cosmos grew from the collapse of a pre-existing universe. Will the same fate await us?It depends. We used to think […]