{"id":853,"date":"2008-09-02T19:16:13","date_gmt":"2008-09-03T00:16:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=853"},"modified":"2008-10-10T08:48:13","modified_gmt":"2008-10-10T13:48:13","slug":"the-multiverse-at-perimeter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=853","title":{"rendered":"The Multiverse at Perimeter"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, the Perimeter Institute is hosting a conference entitled A Debate in Cosmology – The Multiverse<\/a>. Here’s the schedule<\/a>, and talks have started to appear on-line here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some of the speakers will be discussing the Many Worlds interpretation of QM. It has always mystified me why this sometimes gets put together with the string theory landscape sort of multiverse. It will be interesting to see how many of the speakers address the fundamental problem of the subject, that of coming up with a plausible falsifiable prediction. Lee Smolin has generally put that problem front and center, but he tends to be alone in doing this. The more usual thing in this subject is to go on about what an important idea the multiverse is, then make some sort of excuse for not being able to predict anything with it.<\/p>\n

Also dealing with the problem of multiverse predictivity is this new preprint<\/a> on the arXiv about the landscape, and this laudatory commentary<\/a> from Lubos. According to him, it’s not much of a problem that one is talking about measuring low energy observables to 500 digit accuracy, when one can’t now even predict their rough order of magnitude.<\/p>\n

My colleague Brian Greene will be at Perimeter this week, giving a public talk about his new book Icarus at the Edge of Time<\/a>. It is being released to bookstores today and I haven’t yet seen a copy, but it appears to be a science fiction book mainly aimed at children, illustrated with pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope. There’s a blog entry about the design of the book here<\/a>, with some pages of the book here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Update<\/strong>: Sabine Hossenfelder has reports from the conference<\/a> and public lecture<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, the Perimeter Institute is hosting a conference entitled A Debate in Cosmology – The Multiverse. Here’s the schedule, and talks have started to appear on-line here. Some of the speakers will be discussing the Many Worlds interpretation of … Continue reading →<\/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-853","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\/853","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=853"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1011,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/853\/revisions\/1011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}