It turns out the multiverse does exist, just off the A76, 25 miles north of Dumfries in Scotland. It’s called the Crawick Multiverse and is now open 10 am to 4 pm. Admission is 5 pounds, but parking is free.
For more details, see this story, which explains about the huge mounds, and that
There’s also a mound where mudstone slabs trace a spiral path up to the top that represents the multiverse. Along the way, some of the slabs are carved out to symbolise other potential universes where different physical laws apply.
The idea seems to be that
the park is a modern take on Neolithic monuments such as Stonehenge, which paid tribute to the movements of the Solar System – but this time the focus is on the latest advances in physics, such as chaos theory and the idea of parallel universes.
so while Stonehenge was designed to last forever and show that a primitive people understood about the solar system, this is going to show our descendants that 21st century humans knew about the multiverse.
Since it is well known that the LHC is our best chance of figuring out if multiverses exist, it seems that the people at CERN have agreed to have the same person build something like this there. This should ensure that when any future generations excavate the LHC site, they will get some idea of its purpose, and marvel at how much progress the human race made after the Neolithic era.
Update: Another observation of a multiverse, this one in Trieste.
Stonehenge is obviously the remnants of a neolithic gas holder and has nothing to do with astronomy. The metal has long since rusted away, but one can see that the raised stone ring would have supported an enormous tank, supplying, I expect, most of the south of England (in this universe, at least: I cannot speak for other universes).
No one expects the entanglish exposition.
PT Barnum had it right oh so many years ago.
I know you’re mocking it, but I actually like the look of it! I like massive land art and sculpture parks. It goes without saying that a multiverse would profoundly affect the way we think about ourselves, and it’s cool to explore that through art. This is one spin-off from the multiverse we can enjoy.
Bayes_or_bust,
Maybe we should be even more radical and try to explore the multiverse exclusively through art.
I think that when science starts to ditch experimental proof, and rely on beauty, it merges with art and becomes understood more as a metaphor than a statement about reality.
I hope this enterprise does well and even features on cosmology TV programs, because (probably unintentionally) it might force science to contemplate just where it is heading.
I don’t think the rot in science is confined to HEP.
Benhard,
that is probably the most reasonable way to proceed. After all, the word “multiverse”, with roughly its contemporary meaning, was coined by Michael Moorcock in his fantasy and science fiction stories (the word appears in William James, but with a very different meaning).
Now we just need to propose the idea of a “nulliverse” – a situation where only zero universes exist, and we will have a complete offer for any metaphysical ideology: nulli-, uni- and multi-verses. So far people who align with solipsism were underrepresented in modern cosmology, but nulliverse could change all that for the better.
Also, aside from the fact that it doesn’t need any experimental evidence whatsoever (whatever the argument others offer, just claim it’s all your imagination and the real world doesn’t actually exist), it would be trivially cheap and easy to build a theme park for the nulliverse. Just so that future generations know that we didn’t leave solipsists out in the cold in modern cosmology…
🙂
Marko
As reality goes
which one is most terse:
a nulli-, a uni-, or a multi-verse?
Or why not a poly-
If that be our curse
For a poly-multi-verse can’t be much worse…
Hi Anon, I quite like the idea of the multiverse, megaverse, multi-level-multiverse bubbleverse, and so on, all as merely parochial regions of the perverse
The satanic multiverses cannot be far off.
I have done the calculations and compute that the probability of a universe with bagpipes is vanishingly small, so we are clearly living in an outlier.
So why, Jon Awbrey, are Glaswegians seen typically as aliens?
Everybody knows that the real universe is the one with the City of Amber at its center. The others are just shadows…
“Believe me, if you’ve seen one multiverse, you’ve seen them all.”
Re: Paddy
I suspect it has something to do with alien abduction.
Jon Awbrey, 🙂 though tread carefully should ever visit Glasgow.
Pingback: Latest: A multiverse theme park | Uncommon Descent