Is There More Than One
Universe?
Dr Charley Lineweaver
Abstract
Our current ideas of the very early universe are based on quantum cosmology. These ideas suggest that our Universe may be embedded in a larger hierarchy of parallel universes called the Multiverse. Sounds crazy but I will try to explain why it makes some sense. We would like to know how or why the constants of physics (e.g. the speed of light, the strength of gravity, the ratio of the proton mass to the electron mass, the cosmological constant) have the values that they do have. For some cosmologists, these constants have special values in our universe which seem to make it “fit for life”. In the context of a multiverse, each universe might have different values for these constants, and then anthropic selection could explain the apparent fitness of our universe to host life. Without a multiverse, we just have to accept the constants as given. I will try to describe possible tests for the existence of the Multiverse.
Charles H. Lineweaver is the coordinator of the Planetary Science Institute at the Australian National University’s and holds a joint appointment as an associate professor in the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Research School of Earth Sciences. He obtained his PhD in astrophysics from the University of California at Berkeley, supervised by George Smoot (awarded the 2006 Physics Nobel Prize for the discovery of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation). Lineweaver’s research areas include cosmology (determination of the age and composition of the universe) exo-planetology (the statistical analysis of exoplanets) and astrobiology (using our new knowledge of cosmology to constrain life in the Universe). His research has been published in Science, Nature, the Astrophysical Journal, Astrobiology, Scientific American, American Journal of Physics, and Microbiology Australia.
Dr Lineweaver is the son of a high school biology teacher and has lived in or travelled through 62 countries, speaks 4 languages and was a semi-professional soccer player in Germany.