A Brief History of the Multiverse
Imagine you can play God and fiddle with the settings of the great cosmic machine.
Turn this knob and make electrons a bit heavier; twiddle that one and make gravitation a trifle weaker. What would be the effect?
The universe would look very different - so different, in fact, that there wouldn't be anyone around to see the result, because the existence of life depends rather critically on the actual settings that Mother Nature selected. Scientists have long puzzled over this rather contrived state of affairs. Why is nature so ingeniously, one might even say suspiciously, friendly to life?
What do the laws of physics care about life and consciousness that they should conspire to make a hospitable universe? It's almost as if a Grand Designer had it all figured out.
The fashionable scientific response to this cosmic conundrum is to invoke the so-called multiverse theory. The idea here is that what we have hitherto been calling "the universe" is nothing of the sort. It is but a small component within a vast assemblage of other universes that together make up a "multiverse."
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