Good question. This video might address that:
I must say that the majority of instances that I come across a discussion of Multiverse is online, in a forum where non-physicists are more apt to be impressed by it and to even consider it seriously. Maybe I don't hang around too many physicists who are working in this area, but the overwhelming majority of physicists that I encounter couldn't be bothered by this topic.
Now, it is not that they, and I, are dismissing it. Like Don Lincoln in the video, I think I'll pay more attention to it, and put time and effort to try and appreciate it ONLY when there are strong indications that such an idea might be right. This means that there are signs of observational/experimental agreement that distinguish it from other theories. Until that happens, Multiverse is nothing more than one of the numerous ideas out there that cannot be tested and have no experimental verification.
That isn't harsh, is it?
Zz.
1 comment:
The video is nice enough, but as you say "the overwhelming majority of physicists that I encounter couldn't be bothered by this topic." The silliest thing is to talk of
"the" multiverse theory when we are really tolking about several totally different physical scenarios. For example, one version simply relies on the universe being infinite while the visible universe is finite. Many physicists are certainly very interested in measuring the curvature and expansion rate of the universe, and are in this sense are very, very, "bothered" with the topic.
Last month there was a conference in Vienna about Quantum foundations. There very few actual Many Worlders there, but Howard Weiseman presented yet _another_ model "Many Interacting Worlds". Here instead of slicing and dicing a giant wavefunction, they imagine a vast number of Bohmian trajectories and propose a (sort of) classical interaction between those trajectories which the guiding wave. I blogged about it breifly at http://ratnapala.de/emqm15.html
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