Day 80 : Book Excerpt : The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos

In the far reaches of an infinite cosmos, there’s a galaxy that looks just like the Milky Way, with a solar system that’s the spitting image of ours, with a planet that’s a dead ringer for earth, with a house that’s indistinguishable from yours, inhabited by someone who looks just like you, who is right now reading this very book and imagining you, in a distant galaxy, just reaching the end of this sentence. And there’s not just one such copy. In an infinite universe, there are infinitely many. In some, your doppelgänger is now reading this sentence, along with you. In others, he or she has skipped ahead, or feels in need of a snack and has put the book down. In others still, he or she has, well, a less than felicitous disposition and is someone you’d rather not meet in a dark alley.

And you won’t. These copies would inhabit realms so distant that light traveling since the big bang wouldn’t have had time to cross the spatial expanse that separates us. But even without the capacity to observe these realms, we’ll see that basic physical principles establish that if the cosmos is infinitely large, it is home to infinitely many parallel worlds—some identical to ours, some differing from ours, many bearing no resemblance to our world at all.
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“Your mathematics is correct, but your physics is abominable.” The 1927 Solvay Conference on Physics was in full swing, and this was Albert Einstein’s reaction when the Belgian Georges Lemaître informed him that the equations of general relativity, which Einstein had published more than a decade earlier, entailed a dramatic rewriting of the story of creation. According to Lemaître’s calculations, the universe began as a tiny speck of astounding density, a “primeval atom” as he would come to call it, which swelled over the vastness of time to become the observable cosmos.

Lemaître cut an unusual figure among the dozens of renowned physicists, in addition to Einstein, who had descended on the Hotel Metropole in Brussels for a week of intense debate on quantum theory. By 1923, he had not only completed his work for a doctorate, but he’d also finished his studies at the Saint-Rombaut seminary and been ordained a Jesuit priest. During a break in the conference, Lemaître, clerical collar in place, approached the man whose equations, he believed, were the basis for a new scientific theory of cosmic origin. Einstein knew of Lemaître’s theory, having read his paper on the subject some months earlier, and could find no fault with his manipulations of general relativity’s equations. In fact, this was not the first time someone had presented Einstein with this result. In 1921, the Russian mathematician and meteorologist Alexander Friedmann had come upon a variety of solutions to Einstein’s equations in which space would stretch, causing the universe to expand. Einstein balked at those solutions, at first suggesting that Friedmann’s calculations were marred by errors. In this, Einstein was wrong; he later retracted the claim. But Einstein refused to be mathematics’ pawn. He bucked the equations in favor of his intuition about how the cosmos should be, his deep-seated belief that the universe was eternal and, on the largest of scales, fixed and unchanging. The universe, Einstein admonished Lemaître, is not now expanding and never was.

Six years later, in a seminar room at Mount Wilson Observatory in California, Einstein focused intently as Lemaître laid out a more detailed version of his theory that the universe began in a primordial flash and that the galaxies were burning embers floating on a swelling sea of space. When the seminar concluded, Einstein stood up and declared Lemaître’s theory to be “the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.” The world’s most famous physicist had been persuaded to change his mind about one of the world’s most challenging mysteries. While still largely unknown to the general public, Lemaître would come to be known among scientists as the father of the big bang.
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Einstein began work on general relativity around 1907, a time when most scientists thought gravity had long since been explained by the work of Isaac Newton. As high school students around the world are routinely taught, in the late 1600s Newton came up with his so-called Universal Law of Gravity, providing the first mathematical description of this most familiar of nature’s forces. His law is so accurate that NASA engineers still use it to calculate spacecraft trajectories, and astronomers still use it to predict the motion of comets, stars, even entire galaxies.

Such demonstrable efficacy makes it all the more remarkable that, in the early years of the twentieth century, Einstein realized that Newton’s Law of Gravity was deeply flawed. A seemingly simpleminded question revealed this starkly: How, Einstein asked, does gravity work? How, for example, does the sun reach out across 93 million miles of essentially empty space and affect the motion of the earth? There’s no rope tethering them together, no chain tugging the earth as it moves, so how does gravity exert its influence?

In his Principia, published in 1687, Newton recognized the importance of this question but acknowledged that his own law was disturbingly silent about the answer. Newton was certain that there had to be something communicating gravity from place to place, but he was unable to identify what that something might be. In the Principia he gibingly left the question “to the consideration of the reader,” and for more than two hundred years, those who read this challenge simply read on. That’s something Einstein couldn’t do.

~~The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos -by- Brian Greene