Jose Carillo's Forum

TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR

This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.

The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.

I hope you’ll enjoy the new selections that will be presented here each week.

Joe Carillo

A world of a great many pocket universes and life forms

Is there life beyond the universe that we know?

Two physicists, Alejandro Jenkins from Costa Rica and Gilad Perez from Israel, postulate that multiple other universes—each with its own laws of physics—may have emerged from the same primordial vacuum that gave rise to ours. In an article for the January 2010 issue of Scientific American magazine, they theorize that many of these universes may contain intricate structures and perhaps even some forms of life. And they suggest that the universe we know may not be as “finely tuned” for the emergence of life as had been previously thought.

Multiverse
Artwork from Scientific American

Based on modern cosmology theory, Jenkins and Perez say, “Our universe would be but one of many pocket universes within a wider expanse called the multiverse. In the overwhelming majority of those universes, the laws of physics might not allow the formation of matter as we know it or of galaxies, stars, planets and life…Our recent studies, however, suggest that some of these other universes—assuming they exist—may not be so inhospitable after all. Remarkably, we have found examples of alternative values of the fundamental constants, and thus of alternative sets of physical laws, that might still lead to very interesting worlds and perhaps to life.”

Read “Looking for Life in the Multiverse” in the Scientific American now!

About the Authors:

Alejandro Jenkins, a native of Costa Rica, is in the High Energy Physics group at Florida State University. He has degrees from Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology, and he investigated alternative universes while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Bob Jaffe and Itamar Kimchi. Gilad Perez is a theorist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, where he received his PhD in 2003. While at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, he explored the multiverse with Roni Harnik of Stanford University and Graham D. Kribs of the University of Oregon. He has also done stints at Stony Brook University, Boston University and Harvard.

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