Plucking the Strings of the Multiverse

Brian Greene weaves a fugue of metaphysical harmony, jamming out a made-for-TV soliloquy for fundamental physics.

I caught the sparkle in his eye during his TED talk this year, now online.

“There are many universes (10^500), each with a different shape for the extra dimensions.”

“Our bubble is but one in a cosmic bubble bath of universes.”

But… but, isn’t this a bit, umm, irrelevant to the daily grind?

So I thought until I invested in a company that is taking advantage of this to transcend Moore’s Law. If we could engage parallel universes, perhaps we could outperform anything that could be built using just one. We could harness the refractive echoes of trillions of parallel universes entangled in a unified computation. I even named the U.S. investment vehicle for this Canadian company “Parallel Universes, Inc.”

So far it seems to be working. Let’s pause on this sub point of Greene’s logic with Oxford’s David Deutsch: “Quantum computers have the potential to solve problems that would take a classical computer longer than the age of the universe.” And the only way to explain their behavior invokes parallel universes. More on this later.

Some more Greene gems from the TED talk:

“The central idea of string theory is quite straightforward. It says that if you examine any piece of matter ever more finely…you’d find little tiny vibrating filaments of energy, little tiny vibrating strings. And just like the strings on a violin that can vibrate in different patterns producing different musical notes, these little fundamental strings vibrate to produce different kinds of particles — electrons, quarks, neutrinos, photons — all other particles would unite into a single framework, and they would all arise from vibrating strings. It’s a compelling picture, a kind of cosmic symphony where all the richness that we see in the world around us emerges from the music that these little tiny strings can play.” (minute 7:00)

“Sometimes nature guards her secrets with the unbreakable grip of physical law. Sometimes the true nature of reality beckons from just beyond the horizon.” (closing words at minute 20:00)

Greene argues for the anthropic principle — why is our universe so finely tuned to support the possibility of matter and life? Perhaps because we as observers, by definition, are in the universe where the parameters make our form of life possible. But there are many others.

A derivative theory, Gardner’s Selfish Biocosm hypothesis extends evolution across successive universes. His premise is that the anthropic qualities of our universe (life and intelligence-friendly physics) derive from “an enormously lengthy cosmic replication cycle in which… our cosmos duplicates itself and propagates one or more “baby universes.” The hypothesis suggests that the cosmos is “selfish” in the same metaphorical sense that evolutionary theorist and ultra-Darwinist Richard Dawkins proposed that genes are “selfish.” …The cosmos is “selfishly” focused upon the overarching objective of achieving its own replication.”

Gardner concludes with a nested spiral of evolutionary recapitulation:
“An implication of the Selfish Biocosm hypothesis is that the emergence of life and ever more accomplished forms of intelligence is inextricably linked to the physical birth, evolution, and reproduction of the cosmos.”

Perhaps evolution is a conserved and resonant developmental homology at all scales of iteration.