{"id":2404,"date":"2009-10-22T16:28:24","date_gmt":"2009-10-22T21:28:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2404"},"modified":"2009-10-23T15:47:54","modified_gmt":"2009-10-23T20:47:54","slug":"physicists-calculate-alternative-universes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2404","title":{"rendered":"Physicists Calculate Alternative Universes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>According to a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stanforddaily.com\/cgi-bin\/?p=1034706\">story in the Stanford Daily<\/a>, the recent arXiv preprint mentioned <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2365\">here<\/a> and discussed many other places on the web has given us two new scientific celebrities:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Two of Stanford\u2019s physicists, Professor Andrei Linde and postdoctoral researcher Vitaly Vanchurin, have garnered recent celebrity-status in the scientific community for their recent discovery of the maximum number of alternate universes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Instead of consulting experts in this field and getting quotes about how significant this pseudo-science is, the writer asks Stanford students, who do a much better job than the experts:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cI personally find the concept intriguing, but I think we should be wary of scientists who can use it as a way to write things off and stop looking for deeper answers to physical phenomena,\u201d Lauren Janas \u201912 said&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Some Stanford students are not entirely convinced of Vanchurin and Linde\u2018s complicated methods.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m quite skeptical,\u201d Frank Liu \u201913 said. \u201cI think it\u2019s hard to tell how many universes there exactly are.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The story ends with the mystifying news that the authors hope &#8220;that in the future, they can work with modular observations to confirm their findings.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>For more media coverage of the multiverse, see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hulu.com\/watch\/98264\/family-guy-road-to-the-multiverse\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>: Oops, last link was broken, now fixed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>According to a story in the Stanford Daily, the recent arXiv preprint mentioned here and discussed many other places on the web has given us two new scientific celebrities: Two of Stanford\u2019s physicists, Professor Andrei Linde and postdoctoral researcher Vitaly &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2404\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-multiverse-mania"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2404"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2408,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2404\/revisions\/2408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}