{"id":2773,"date":"2010-03-03T17:32:11","date_gmt":"2010-03-03T22:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2773"},"modified":"2010-03-03T23:39:27","modified_gmt":"2010-03-04T04:39:27","slug":"first-hint-that-the-multiverse-really-exists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2773","title":{"rendered":"First Hint That the Multiverse Really Exists"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Multiverse mania rolls along, with New Scientist this week running a cover story entitled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/mg20527501.100-a-measure-for-the-multiverse.html\">Touching the Multiverse<\/a>.  They advertise the story by <a href=\"http:\/\/skumarsnet.blogspot.com\/2010\/03\/touching-multiverse.html\">claiming<\/a> that &#8220;we reveal the first hint that the multiverse really exists&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>It turns out that this is a promotional effort for the work of Raphael Bousso, with the first hint that multiverse really exists a <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/hep-th\/0702115\">paper<\/a> of his from more than 3 years ago that purports to &#8220;predict&#8221; the observed value of the cosmological constant.  This in some way improves on Weinberg&#8217;s 1987 anthropic argument, which to this day remains about the only piece of evidence backing up multiverse mania.  The New Scientist article also reports on his more recent attempts to better justify the 3 year-old calculation with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2650\">this decade&#8217;s buzz-word<\/a> (&#8220;entropic principle&#8221;) as well as that of the last decade (&#8220;holographic&#8221;).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Multiverse mania rolls along, with New Scientist this week running a cover story entitled Touching the Multiverse. They advertise the story by claiming that &#8220;we reveal the first hint that the multiverse really exists&#8221;. It turns out that this is &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=2773\">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_post_was_ever_published":false,"_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":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2773","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\/2773","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=2773"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2777,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2773\/revisions\/2777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}