相关论文: Multiverses and Cosmology: Philosophical Issues

The current debate about a possible change of paradigm from a single universe to a multiverse scenario could have deep implications on our view of cosmology and of science in general. These implications therefore deserve to be analyzed from…

Ever since its foundations were laid nearly a century ago, quantum theory has provoked questions about the very nature of reality. We address these questions by considering the universe, and the multiverse, fundamentally as complex…

We define a universe as the contents of a spacetime box with comoving walls, large enough to contain essentially all phenomena that can be conceivably measured. The initial time is taken as the epoch when the lowest CMB modes undergo…

The possibility of fundamental theories with very many ground states, each with different physical parameters, changes the way that we approach the major questions of particle physics. Most importantly, it raises the possibility that these…

We give an introduction to the cosmological multiverse, aimed at an audience of artists. We discuss general relativity -- our modern theory of gravity -- and the cosmological constant, which is widely believed to be responsible for the…

The observable universe is necessarily hospitable for life. There are indications, however, that the laws of physics and cosmological parameters need not take the form and values observed, and if they were slightly different life could not…

What do we do when cosmology raises questions it cannot answer? These include the existence of a multiverse and the universality of the laws of physics. We cannot settle any of these issues by experiment, and this is where philosophers…

The multiverse is a hierarchy in the number of universes, increasing stepwise towards infinity. It is an evolutionary system, in which universes survive only near critical mass. That mass is actually a factor of 1.94 less than the critical…

The fundamental laws and constants of our universe seem to be finely tuned for life. The various multiverse hypotheses are popular explanations for the fine tuning. This paper reviews the four main suggestions on inference in the presence…

I survey physics theories involving parallel universes, arguing that they form a natural four-level hierarchy of multiverses allowing progressively greater diversity. Level I: A generic prediction of inflation is an infinite ergodic…

The theory of the inflationary multiverse changes the way we think about our place in the world. According to its most popular version, our world may consist of infinitely many exponentially large parts, exhibiting different sets of…

The multiverse view in set theory, introduced and argued for in this article, is the view that there are many distinct concepts of set, each instantiated in a corresponding set-theoretic universe. The universe view, in contrast, asserts…

Extracting predictions from cosmological theories that describe a multiverse, for what we are likely to observe in our domain, is crucial to establishing the validity of these theories. One way to extract such predictions is from…

Quantum information theory and the multiverse are two of the greatest outcomes of the XX century physics. The consideration of entanglement between the quantum states of two or more universes in a multiverse scenario provides us with a…

Cosmology is usually understood as an observational science, where experimentation plays no role. It is interesting, nevertheless, to change this perspective addressing the following question: what should we do to create a universe, in a…

We consider the proposition that multiple universes exist by reviewing the various manifestations. In recent years, this idea has been elevated from science fiction and introduced in separate guises as an explanation for coincidence…

Theoretical achievements, as well as much controversy, surround multiverse theory. Various types of multiverses, with an increasing amount of complexity, were suggested and thoroughly discussed in literature by now. While these types are…

The discovery of accelerating expansion of the universe has led us to take the dramatic view that our universe may be one of the many universes in which low energy physical laws take different forms: the multiverse. I explain why/how this…

If our universe has appeared in a result of Big Bang or something like this, whether we have reasons to deny an existence of other universes appearing by the same or similar way? An objection that there is no anything like it, is doubtful,…

Evolution needs long times and large numbers of samples or species. Our finely tuned physics can therefore not have evolved during the fast changes of a single Big-Bang universe, but the cosmological scales for time and for the number of…