Multiverse



The Mystery of the God Particle – The Unpublished Newsweek Letter

Here is a letter to the editor of Newsweek, commenting upon Lawrence Krauss’s article, The Godless Particle, published in the July 16, 2012 issue of Newsweek.   The Higgs finding illustrates a serious problem with modern physics and cosmology: scientists want to bedazzle the public with the latest discovery of “the secret to the universe” and the consequent vanquishing of God, but remain tight-lipped about the assumptions embedded in their theories and the mysteries remaining. While Lawrence Krauss and others triumphantly proclaim that the Higgs particle (assuming it has been found in fleeting collisions of elementary particles) solves the mystery of mass, they remain silent about how the Higgs field itself arose. As the more forthright Nobel prize-winning physicist Martinus J.G. Veltman notes, with the Higgs particle “ignorance about the origin of mass is replaced by the ignorance about the particle-Higgs couplings, and no real knowledge is gained.” In other...

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Response to Lawrence Krauss and His Materialistic Vision

In a recent article on Scientific American’s website, entitled Consolation of Philosophy, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-consolation-of-philos&page=2, Professor Lawrence Krauss expounds on some of the themes in his book, A Universe from Nothing, and concludes that philosophy has nothing of importance to tell us about the real world, and that only physics can lead us to truth. Professor Krauss, in rejecting philosophy, fails to acknowledge that he is promoting his own brand of philosophy known as scientific materialism.  So what he really seems to be saying is that scientific materialism is the final truth, and we should not bother considering any other alternative. But scientific materialism – the view that a real world of matter exists independently of consciousness – has a number of fatal flaws.  Two of them are (1) several great thinkers, such as Bishop George Berkeley, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant, showed that we can never prove that such a real world of matter...

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Scientific American Article Puts the Multiverse in its Place

The multiverse — the notion that our universe is simply one among trillions— is currently in vogue in modern cosmology.   The multiverse is the subject of the best-selling books, The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, and The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene, as well as others by popular science writers, John Barrow and John Gribbin.  It is the topic of numerous articles in the leading scientific magazines, and has even caught the attention of  The Wall Street Journal, which has published an excerpt from The Grand Design, interviewed Brian Greene on the topic, and published John Gribbin’s review of The Hidden Reality.   As is so often the case, the difficulty is in determining whether this latest cosmological theory warrants our attention.  The answer is yes. To begin with, the multiverse is important because it is the product of today’s scientific thought leaders, which is to say...

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Heaven is the Better Bet

           As widely reported, Stephen Hawking announced in a recent interview with the Guardian newspaper that there is no heaven, and that any such notion is simply a fairly tale.            At the same time Mr. Hawking holds this negative thought in his mind, he also concludes that the body is a machine, the brain is a decaying computer, the universe mysteriously arose from background vibrations, and our universe is simply one of roughly 10500 other ones. The only distinguishing feature of our universe is that it just so happens to possess exactly the right conditions and physical laws to support life.  The other 10500 – 1 universes are not so lucky.           So Mr. Hawking, like so many materialists, trades a world of hope for one of dire speculation.  What evidence does Mr. Hawking have for the multiverse? None.  What evidence does he have for universes popping out of...

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Powerful Hallucinations and the Multiverse

           The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos is the new book by Brian Greene, the best-selling author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos.  Hidden Reality describes nine different ways modern scientists reach the theoretical conclusion that there is actually more than one universe out there.  According to the multiverse concept, there is anywhere from 10500 to an infinity of other universes, in dimensions we cannot see and in regions of space we will never encounter.               To his credit, Professor Greene acknowledges that “the subject of parallel universes is highly speculative.  No experiment or observation has established that any version of the idea is realize in nature.”  (p. 8). He’s “laid out a general prescription for how a multiverse proposal might be testable, but at our current level of understanding none of the mutliverse theories we’ve encountered yet meet the...

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