{"id":7822,"date":"2015-06-17T13:26:59","date_gmt":"2015-06-17T17:26:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=7822"},"modified":"2015-06-29T10:32:51","modified_gmt":"2015-06-29T14:32:51","slug":"multiversal-journeys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=7822","title":{"rendered":"Multiversal Journeys"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the many efforts to promote the Multiverse to the public way back when (2005-2007, some of their advertisements are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mvjs.org\/radio-ads\/\">here<\/a>) was an organization called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mvjs.org\/\">Multiversal Journeys<\/a>.  Back in 2006 they got $77,000 in funding from the Templeton Foundation (via FQXi).  Since 2007 they seemed to have disappeared, with no more scheduled public events as far as I could tell.<\/p>\n<p>Now they&#8217;re back though, with an upcoming event defensively called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mvjs.org\/events\/\">Clarifying theoretical physics and cosmology misconceptions for SF Bay Area journalists<\/a>.  It&#8217;s unclear exactly what they think the misconceptions are that such journalists need to have clarified.  One of the three announced speakers (John Terning) might actually be able to do some clarification, but the other two seem more devoted to the spreading of misconceptions.<\/p>\n<p>Yasunori Nomura likes to promote the idea that the landscape and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics are one and the same thing (see <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1205.2675\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/quantumfrontiers.com\/2014\/02\/13\/making-predictions-in-the-multiverse\/\">here<\/a>), a claim I believe few serious physicists have ever been able to make sense of.  He also claims that the multiverse can be used to make predictions about physics, and back in 2009 used the multiverse to predict that the Higgs mass would be 141 +\/- 2 GeV (see <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0910.2235\">here<\/a>).  This prediction played a central role in the film <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=6308\">Particle Fever<\/a>, which featured David Kaplan and Nima Arkani-Hamed during the period leading up to the Higgs discovery explaining how a 140 GeV Higgs would mean the multiverse was right.  Will Nomura clarify for the journalists any misconceptions they might have about what scientists are supposed to do when their theory&#8217;s well-publicized prediction is tested and shown to be wrong?<\/p>\n<p>The other speaker is Texas Tech chemist William Poirier, who has some sort of &#8220;Many Interacting Worlds&#8221; theory, which supposedly shows that the observed behavior of particles indicates the existence of parallel universes (see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.depts.ttu.edu\/vpr\/discoveries\/spring-2015\/multiple-universes.php\">here<\/a>).  Again, I&#8217;m curious what misconceptions about physics he plans to clarify to journalists.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  I see that this event will be funded by at $5750 grant from FQXi to Multiversal Journeys (Fall 2014 Mini-grant).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the many efforts to promote the Multiverse to the public way back when (2005-2007, some of their advertisements are here) was an organization called Multiversal Journeys. Back in 2006 they got $77,000 in funding from the Templeton Foundation &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=7822\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","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-7822","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\/7822","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=7822"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7832,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7822\/revisions\/7832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}