I can assure you that no string theorist would be interested in working on string theory if it were somehow permanently beyond testability. That would no longer be doing science.
There are many of us thinking of one version of parallel universe theory or another. If it’s all a lot of nonsense, then it’s a lot of wasted effort going into this far-out idea. But if this idea is correct, it is a fantastic upheaval in our understanding.
I’ve spent something like 17 years working on a theory for which there is essentially no direct experimental support.
The revelation we’ve come to is that we can trust our memories of a past with lower, not higher, entropy only if the big bang – the process, event, or happening that brought the universe into existence – started off the universe in an extraordinarily special, highly ordered state of low entropy.
A watch worn by a particle of light would not tick at all. Light realizes the dreams of Ponce de Leon and the cosmetics industry: it doesn’t age.
According to inflation, the more than 100 billion galaxies, sparkling throughout space like heavenly diamonds, are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky. To me, this realization is one of the greatest wonders of the modern scientific age.
So: if you buy the notion that reality consists of the things in your freeze-frame mental image right now, and if you agree that your now is no more valid than the now of someone located far away in space who can move freely, then reality encompasses all of the events in spacetime.
Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.
We might be the holographic image of a two-dimensional structure.
If the theory turns out to be right, that will be tremendously thick and tasty icing on the cake.
You should never be surprised by or feel the need to explain why any physical system is in a high entropy state.
But, as Einstein once said, “For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”5.
Falsifiability for a theory is great, but a theory can still be respectable even if it is not falsifiable, as long as it is verifiable.
Understanding requires insight. Insight must be anchored.
How can a speck of a universe be physically identical to the great expanse we view in the heavens above?
I can’t stand clutter. I can’t stand piles of stuff. And whenever I see it, I basically just throw the stuff away.
I believe we owe our young an education that captures the exhilarating drama of science.
We are living through a remarkably privileged era, when certain deep truths about the cosmos are still within reach of the human spirit of exploration.
If string theory is right, the microscopic fabric of our universe is a richly intertwined multidimensional labyrinth within which the strings of the universe endlessly twist and vibrate, rhythmically beating out the laws of the cosmos.
All mathematics is is a language that is well tuned, finely honed, to describe patterns; be it patterns in a star, which has five points that are regularly arranged, be it patterns in numbers like 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 that follow very regular progression.