Something from nothing? Image courtesy of Strobridge Litho. Co., Cincinnati & New York. (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license).
Joel Kontinen
The universe is fine tuned for life. Astronomers know it and some of them don’t like it, as it suggests a Creator God, who made life possible.
In a desperate attempt to evade accountability to Him, they have designed theories that attempt to explain the origin of everything by purely naturalistic means as though He did not exist at all. One fairly popular attempt is to suggest the
existence of multiverses or many parallel universes.
There is no scientific evidence for them. Physicist Rob Sheldon says that the only motivation behind the thinking is
to defend atheism.
A recent article in
New Scientist looks at the problems in this kind of thinking:
“
Quantum fluctuations in the early universe made matter denser in some regions than others, resulting in a cosmic web of galaxies, stars, planets and, ultimately, people.”
The biggest problem in this scenario is that no one knows whether quantum fluctuations have the power to create or even increase genetic information without which the theory would be dead.
Big bang based models have their fair share of problems.
In 1980 Alan Guth invented inflation as an attempt to solve the horizon problem caused by the almost uniform temperature of the different parts of the universe.
If, as Big Bang advocates believe, the universe is 13.8 billion years old, then this is a huge problem. One edge of the universe would be 27.6 billion light years away from the other edge and there would not be enough time for the temperature to become uniform.
Guth proposed that in its infancy the universe had a quick growth spurt in which it exceeded the speed of light. No one knows what caused it and what caused the universe to decelerate.
The
New Scientist article points out some problems in multiverse thinking:
“
THE multiverse is dead, long live the multiverse. A radical new way of looking at quantum mechanics suggests that even the multiverse will come to an end.
A popular view of the multiverse says that our universe is just one of an ever-inflating multitude of discrete ‘bubble’ universes. These bubbles are eternally budding off new universes even as individual universes age and die.”
Now, this is nothing more than wishful thinking. New Scientist nonetheless introduces a new view of quantum effects suggested by Sean Carroll at the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues that attempts to solve the difficulties.
They basically postulate that in the beginning, before anything else – including quantum fluctations – there was the inflaton that “
decayed into different types of ordinary particles, which could then interact with each other” and eventually underwent quantum fluctations.
If this sounds like science fiction, the obvious explanation is, that it is.
Source:
Grossman, Lisa. 2014. Quantum twist could kill off the multiverse.
New Scientist 2969. (14 May).
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