Distant Time and the Hint of a Multiverse

Here’s a nice “deep thoughts” type video to close out your weekend. Carl Sagan famously said that to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that. 

We sit here today roughly 13.7 billion years after the Big Bang, that point at which all the matter in our known universe began expanding from an infinitely small and ordered point of everythingness. Many, if not all,  of our basic laws of physics, and in fact the very reason we are alive, depends on the fact that the universe has been increasing in disorder since that point. That idea of “entropy” is the reason that “now” is different from “then” and why our biological chemistry functions in the first place. It’s all thermodynamics, man.

Let Sean Carroll tell you how the expanding, accelerating universe doesn’t quite explain how all the matter in the universe was once ordered and compressed before the Big Bang, how that means that our galaxy isn’t some sort of freak occurrence, and how that gives us hints that there might be other universes beyond our own that spawned our Big Bang.

It’s brainy stuff, but few people explain it better than Sean Carroll. He also has a very highly recommended new book out about the Higgs Boson, if you’re into that kind of thing: The Particle at the End of the Universe.

explore-blog: Carl Sagan sends Timothy Leary a letter, delights in his typo. As is noted in the letter above, this is a universe in which the laws of special relativity declare that an object moving near the speed of light will experience time dilation, the relative slowing of time, compared to an observer.  This is also a universe that can not fully explain its expansion or what happened at the very moment at which it was formed, and therefore must invoke the idea that there are many universes, each existing like a bubble in a sudsy bathtub. But even if the second is true, that there are many universes, perhaps an infinite number, I’m glad I live in the one where Carl Sagan wrote Timothy Leary a letter about the first. Pure awesome.
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explore-blog:

Carl Sagan sends Timothy Leary a letter, delights in his typo.

As is noted in the letter above, this is a universe in which the laws of special relativity declare that an object moving near the speed of light will experience time dilation, the relative slowing of time, compared to an observer. 

This is also a universe that can not fully explain its expansion or what happened at the very moment at which it was formed, and therefore must invoke the idea that there are many universes, each existing like a bubble in a sudsy bathtub.

But even if the second is true, that there are many universes, perhaps an infinite number, I’m glad I live in the one where Carl Sagan wrote Timothy Leary a letter about the first.

Pure awesome.

staceythinx: Illustrations by Moonrunner About Moonrunner: Moonrunner is primarily known for its science-based illustrations, especially in such fields as astro-physics, cosmology, dark energy, black holes, the solar system and such stellar phenomena as quasars, star nurseries and pulsars. We have worked with Stephen Hawking, as well as with the scientist/authors of the National Geographic and Scientific American magazines, and also those publishing with Dorling Kindersley, Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Weldon Owen. Click on the images to see what they represent. That’s what I call some serious astro-illustration. Be sure to click on the photos above to check out the explanations in the slide show. 
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staceythinx: Illustrations by Moonrunner About Moonrunner: Moonrunner is primarily known for its science-based illustrations, especially in such fields as astro-physics, cosmology, dark energy, black holes, the solar system and such stellar phenomena as quasars, star nurseries and pulsars. We have worked with Stephen Hawking, as well as with the scientist/authors of the National Geographic and Scientific American magazines, and also those publishing with Dorling Kindersley, Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Weldon Owen. Click on the images to see what they represent. That’s what I call some serious astro-illustration. Be sure to click on the photos above to check out the explanations in the slide show. 
Zoom Info
staceythinx: Illustrations by Moonrunner About Moonrunner: Moonrunner is primarily known for its science-based illustrations, especially in such fields as astro-physics, cosmology, dark energy, black holes, the solar system and such stellar phenomena as quasars, star nurseries and pulsars. We have worked with Stephen Hawking, as well as with the scientist/authors of the National Geographic and Scientific American magazines, and also those publishing with Dorling Kindersley, Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Weldon Owen. Click on the images to see what they represent. That’s what I call some serious astro-illustration. Be sure to click on the photos above to check out the explanations in the slide show. 
Zoom Info
staceythinx: Illustrations by Moonrunner About Moonrunner: Moonrunner is primarily known for its science-based illustrations, especially in such fields as astro-physics, cosmology, dark energy, black holes, the solar system and such stellar phenomena as quasars, star nurseries and pulsars. We have worked with Stephen Hawking, as well as with the scientist/authors of the National Geographic and Scientific American magazines, and also those publishing with Dorling Kindersley, Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Weldon Owen. Click on the images to see what they represent. That’s what I call some serious astro-illustration. Be sure to click on the photos above to check out the explanations in the slide show. 
Zoom Info
staceythinx: Illustrations by Moonrunner About Moonrunner: Moonrunner is primarily known for its science-based illustrations, especially in such fields as astro-physics, cosmology, dark energy, black holes, the solar system and such stellar phenomena as quasars, star nurseries and pulsars. We have worked with Stephen Hawking, as well as with the scientist/authors of the National Geographic and Scientific American magazines, and also those publishing with Dorling Kindersley, Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Weldon Owen. Click on the images to see what they represent. That’s what I call some serious astro-illustration. Be sure to click on the photos above to check out the explanations in the slide show. 
Zoom Info
staceythinx: Illustrations by Moonrunner About Moonrunner: Moonrunner is primarily known for its science-based illustrations, especially in such fields as astro-physics, cosmology, dark energy, black holes, the solar system and such stellar phenomena as quasars, star nurseries and pulsars. We have worked with Stephen Hawking, as well as with the scientist/authors of the National Geographic and Scientific American magazines, and also those publishing with Dorling Kindersley, Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Weldon Owen. Click on the images to see what they represent. That’s what I call some serious astro-illustration. Be sure to click on the photos above to check out the explanations in the slide show. 
Zoom Info
staceythinx: Illustrations by Moonrunner About Moonrunner: Moonrunner is primarily known for its science-based illustrations, especially in such fields as astro-physics, cosmology, dark energy, black holes, the solar system and such stellar phenomena as quasars, star nurseries and pulsars. We have worked with Stephen Hawking, as well as with the scientist/authors of the National Geographic and Scientific American magazines, and also those publishing with Dorling Kindersley, Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Weldon Owen. Click on the images to see what they represent. That’s what I call some serious astro-illustration. Be sure to click on the photos above to check out the explanations in the slide show. 
Zoom Info
staceythinx: Illustrations by Moonrunner About Moonrunner: Moonrunner is primarily known for its science-based illustrations, especially in such fields as astro-physics, cosmology, dark energy, black holes, the solar system and such stellar phenomena as quasars, star nurseries and pulsars. We have worked with Stephen Hawking, as well as with the scientist/authors of the National Geographic and Scientific American magazines, and also those publishing with Dorling Kindersley, Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Weldon Owen. Click on the images to see what they represent. That’s what I call some serious astro-illustration. Be sure to click on the photos above to check out the explanations in the slide show. 
Zoom Info
staceythinx: Illustrations by Moonrunner About Moonrunner: Moonrunner is primarily known for its science-based illustrations, especially in such fields as astro-physics, cosmology, dark energy, black holes, the solar system and such stellar phenomena as quasars, star nurseries and pulsars. We have worked with Stephen Hawking, as well as with the scientist/authors of the National Geographic and Scientific American magazines, and also those publishing with Dorling Kindersley, Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Weldon Owen. Click on the images to see what they represent. That’s what I call some serious astro-illustration. Be sure to click on the photos above to check out the explanations in the slide show. 
Zoom Info
staceythinx: Illustrations by Moonrunner About Moonrunner: Moonrunner is primarily known for its science-based illustrations, especially in such fields as astro-physics, cosmology, dark energy, black holes, the solar system and such stellar phenomena as quasars, star nurseries and pulsars. We have worked with Stephen Hawking, as well as with the scientist/authors of the National Geographic and Scientific American magazines, and also those publishing with Dorling Kindersley, Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Weldon Owen. Click on the images to see what they represent. That’s what I call some serious astro-illustration. Be sure to click on the photos above to check out the explanations in the slide show. 
Zoom Info

staceythinx:

Illustrations by Moonrunner

About Moonrunner:

Moonrunner is primarily known for its science-based illustrations, especially in such fields as astro-physics, cosmology, dark energy, black holes, the solar system and such stellar phenomena as quasars, star nurseries and pulsars. We have worked with Stephen Hawking, as well as with the scientist/authors of the National Geographic and Scientific American magazines, and also those publishing with Dorling Kindersley, Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Weldon Owen.

Click on the images to see what they represent.

That’s what I call some serious astro-illustration. Be sure to click on the photos above to check out the explanations in the slide show. 

If you had in this chair some of the people who developed quantum mechanics back in the 1920s or 1930s, and you said to them, ‘What is this stuff gonna DO for us?’ they’d say ‘Probably not much, we’re trying to understand molecules and atoms, very far from everyday life.’

But the fact that you have a cell phone, the fact that you have a personal computer, the fact that there’s wondrous medical technology that’s saving lives around the world today all relies on the integrated circuit, which comes from quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics are responsible for something like 35% of the Gross National Product. Which is just to say fundamental research at a given moment in time can have big implications when you allow it to mature.

Cosmologist Brian Greene, in an interview with The Daily Beast.

Investing in basic science must be disconnected from traditional returns, and instead viewed as an investment in the intellectual capital of tomorrow. It’s hard to put a price tag on inspiration, and Goldman Sachs has yet to write an algorithm to predict the science of the future.

Check out his Newsweek cover story “Welcome to the Multiverse” including the rest of the interview.