http://www.physorg.com/news118241154.html

Stranger that fiction: parallel universes beguile science

Philip Pullman, screenplay writer of The Golden Compass film arrives for the
premiere of the film The Golden Compass, November 2007 in London's Leicester
Square Odeon cinema. The specter of shadow worlds has been thrown into
relief by the December release of "The Golden Compass," a Hollywood
blockbuster adapted from the first volume of Pullman's classic sci-fi
trilogy, "His Dark Materials".

Is the universe -- correction: "our" universe -- no more than a speck of
cosmic dust amid an infinite number of parallel worlds?
A staple of mind-bending science fiction, the possibility of multiple
universes has long intrigued hard-nosed physicists, mathematicians and
cosmologists too.

 We may not be able -- as least not yet -- to prove they exist, many serious
scientists say, but there are plenty of reasons to think that parallel
dimensions are more than figments of eggheaded imagination.

The specter of shadow worlds has been thrown into relief by the December
release of "The Golden Compass," a Hollywood blockbuster adapted from the
first volume of Philip Pullman's classic sci-fi trilogy, "His Dark
Materials".

In the film, an orphaned girl living in an alternate universe goes on a
quest, accompanied by an animal manifestation of her soul, to rescue
kidnapped children and discover the secret of a contaminating dust said to
be leaking from a parallel realm.

Talking bears and magic dust aside, the basic premise of Pullman's fantasy
is not beyond the scientific pale.

"The idea of multiple universes is more than a fantastic invention -- it
appears naturally within several scientific theories, and deserves to be
taken seriously," said Aurelien Barrau, a French particle physicist at the
European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), hardly a hotbed of flaky
science.

"The multiverse is no longer a model, it is a consequence of our models,"
explained Barrau, who recently published an essay for CERN defending the
concept.

There are several competing and overlapping theories about parallel
universes, but the most basic is based on the simple, if mind-boggling, idea
that if the universe is infinite then logically everything that could
possible occur has happened or will happen.

Try this on for size: a copy of you living on a planet and in a solar system
like ours is reading these words just as you are. Your lives have been
carbon copies up to now, but maybe he or she will keep reading even if you
don't, says Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at MIT in Boston, Massachusetts.

The existence of such a doppleganger "does not even assume speculative
modern physics, merely that space is infinite and rather uniformly filled
with matter as indicated by recent astronomical observations," Tegmark
concluded in a study of parallel universes published by Cambridge
University.

"Your alter ego is simply a prediction of the so-called concordance model of
cosmology," he said.

Another type of multiverse arises with the theory of chaotic inflation,
which tells us that all these parallel worlds are expanding so rapidly --
stretching further and further in to space -- that they remain out of reach
even if one could travel at the speed of light forever.

Things get even stranger when one brings the often counter-intuitive laws of
quantum physics into the picture, these experts say.

In a landmark paper published in 1957 while he was still a graduate student
at Princeton University, mathematician Hugh Everett showed how quantum
theory predicts that a single classical reality should gradually split into
separate but simultaneously existing realms.

"This is simply a way of trusting strictly the fundamental equations of
quantum mechanics," says Barrau. "The worlds are not spatially separated,
but exist as kinds of 'parallel' universes."

The borderline between physics and metaphysics is not defined by whether an
entity can be observed, but whether it is testable, pointed out Tegmark.

There are many phenomena -- black holes, curved space, the slowing of time
at high speeds, even a round and rotating Earth -- that were once rejected
as scientific heresy before being proven through experimentation, even if
some remain beyond the grasp of observation, he said.

He concluded that it was becoming increasingly clear that multiverse models
grounded in modern physics could be empirically testable, predictive and
disprovable.

© 2007 AFP

-- 

Ken

"Buddhism elucidates why we are sentient."
"Buddhism follows thought throughout the Universe."
"Karma means that you don't get away with anything."

> In a landmark paper published in 1957 while he was still a graduate 
> student
> at Princeton University, mathematician Hugh Everett showed how quantum
> theory predicts that a single classical reality should gradually split 
> into
> separate but simultaneously existing realms.
>
> "This is simply a way of trusting strictly the fundamental equations of
> quantum mechanics," says Barrau. "The worlds are not spatially separated,
> but exist as kinds of 'parallel' universes."

   Sounds like it might have something to do with diffraction gratings or 
polarizing lenses.

  Alternately, another kind of explanation for the 'Rapture?'