The big, big picture

Don Page is a physicist who has worked with Stephen Hawking on issues in quantum cosmology. He is also a Christian, and some recent talks he has given on issue of God and the multiverse have popped up on Arxiv.

If you like thinking about the Big Picture, this article by Page is well worth reading. As The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy said:

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

Well, just start taking the idea of the multiverse seriously, and even "space" starts to look puny. As the abstract of Page's talk puts it:

Scientists have measured that what we can see of space is about a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion (1081) times the volume of an average human. Inflationary theory suggests that the entirety of space is vastly larger. Quantum theory suggests that there are very many different copies of space of the same basic kind as ours (same laws of physics). String theory further suggests that there may be many different kinds of space. This whole collection of googolplexes of galaxies within each of googolplexes of different spaces within each of googols of kinds of space makes up an enormously vast universe or multiverse. Human beings seem to be an incredibly small part of this universe in terms of physical size.

Page gives a potted history of the increasingly successful efforts of humans to measure the universe. Here is one blackly humorous episode:

Many countries cooperated in sending expeditions to distant parts of the earth to take these measurements of the 1761 and 1769 transits of Venus. Wars and bad weather hampered many attempts, such as the one made by the unfortunate Guillaume Le Gentil of France [3]. In 1761 he could not land at Pondicherry, a French colony in India, because the British had seized it, and he could not make his measurements from his ship that was tossing about at sea. He stayed eight years to make measurements of the 1769 transit (the last transit before 1874) and this time was able to set up his equipment on Pondicherry, which was restored to France by then. But after a month of clear weather, the sky turned cloudy on the morning of the transit, and he again saw nothing. He nearly went insane but gained enough strength to return to France, which took another two years. After being away for nearly twelve years in his fruitless mission to help measure the size of the solar system, Le Gentil finally got back home to find that his “widowed” wife had remarried and his possessions had gone to his heirs.

Of course, there are still a lot of scientists around who think all talk of multiverses and the string theory Landscape barely counts as science, but this hasn't stopped the religiously inclined from starting to see if it can be incorporated into their world view. Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong notes that even the Mormons are talking about this. (But then again this is perhaps to be expected, as their idiosyncratic idea of gods who have children who create worlds to further populate may make it easier for them to incorporate the multiverse into their theology.)

Don Page has a similar go at the topic, in his talk entitled "Does God so Love the Multiverse". (As you may guess, he expects the answer is "yes".) This paper is heavier going that the one about the scale of the universe, but I will again make the redundant statement that, if you like this sort of thing, you will like it.