Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse

Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse

Mary-Jane Rubenstein

Language: English

Pages: 360

ISBN: 0231156634

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


"Multiverse" cosmologies imagine our universe as just one of a vast number of others. While this idea has captivated philosophy, religion, and literature for millennia, it is now being considered as a scientific hypothesis―with different models emerging from cosmology, quantum mechanics, and string theory.

Beginning with ancient Atomist and Stoic philosophies, Mary-Jane Rubenstein links contemporary models of the multiverse to their forerunners and explores the reasons for their recent appearance. One concerns the so-called fine-tuning of the universe: nature's constants are so delicately calibrated that it seems they have been set just right to allow life to emerge. For some thinkers, these "fine-tunings" are evidence of the existence of God; for others, however, and for most physicists, "God" is an insufficient scientific explanation.

Hence the allure of the multiverse: if all possible worlds exist somewhere, then like monkeys hammering out Shakespeare, one universe is bound to be suitable for life. Of course, this hypothesis replaces God with an equally baffling article of faith: the existence of universes beyond, before, or after our own, eternally generated yet forever inaccessible to observation or experiment. In their very efforts to sidestep metaphysics, theoretical physicists propose multiverse scenarios that collide with it and even produce counter-theological narratives. Far from invalidating multiverse hypotheses, Rubenstein argues, this interdisciplinary collision actually secures their scientific viability. We may therefore be witnessing a radical reconfiguration of physics, philosophy, and religion in the modern turn to the multiverse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mathematical and Pseudoscientific Topics (New York: Norton, 2003), 9. 32. For example, Craig, “Design and the Anthropic Fine-Tuning of the Universe,” 171; Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). 33. Richard Dawkins, “The Improbability of God,” Free Inquiry 18, no. 3 (1998): 6, quoted in Davies, Cosmic Jackpot, 219. 34. For a preliminary exploration of the theological implications of ekpyrosis, see Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “The Fire Each Time: Dark Energy

August 2011, 38–43. ———. “Physics Ain’t What It Used to Be: Review of The Cosmic Landscape, by Leonard Susskind.” Nature, December 8, 2005, 739–40. Ellis, G. F. R., U. Kirchner, and W. R. Stoeger. “Multiverses and Physical Cosmology.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 347 (2004): 921–36. arXiv: astro-ph/0305292v3. Everett, Hugh. “‘Relative State’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics.” Review of Modern Physics 29 (1957): 454–62. “The Fabric of the Cosmos: Universe or Multiverse?”

Multiverse Problem.” Seed Magazine, April 14, 2009. Schönborn, Christof. “Finding Design in Nature.” New York Times, July 7, 2005. Schönfeld, Martin. “The Phoenix of Nature: Kant and the Big Bounce.” In “The Copernican Imperative.” Special issue, Collapse 5 (2009): 361–76. Schwarzschild, Karl. “On the Gravitational Field of a Point-Mass, According to Einstein’s Theory.” Translated by Larissa Borissova and Dmitri Rabounski. Abraham Zelmanov Journal 1 (2008): 10–19. “Scientists Believe That

cosmos by means of “the Democritean dinos.” “The vortex (tourbillon) is thus the pre-order of things,” Serres writes, “their nature, in the sense of nativity. Order upon disorder, whatever the disorder may be; the vortex arises.”44 Strangely, however, Lucretius does not mention the vortex in relation to the cosmic cloud—nor does he ascribe any sort of rotational movement to it. Rather, we have a storm of collisions out of which “like things” entangle themselves into a textile of earth and then

quantity and in quality, the very court of celestial angels devoid of grief and replenished with perfect endless joy, the [home] for the elect” (quoted in John D. Barrow, The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless, and Endless [New York: Vintage, 2005], 118). (From Thomas Digges, “A Perfit Description of the Caelestial Orbes,” in Leonard Digges, A Prognostication Everlasting [London, 1576], fol. 43. Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California)

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