5 MIND-BLOWING IDEAS YOU NEED TO WRAP YOUR HEAD AROUND
1 / THERE’S MORE THAN ONE UNIVERSE
ABOUT 10 YEARS AGO my brother wrote a book called God, Actually, in which he argues for the existence of a Divine Being. Its content surprised many of his closest friends and family, who’d always thought of Roy as an atheist. Turned out my brother had experienced a midlife seeing of the light.
Right off the bat he makes the case for the universe being too perfectly finetuned to have occurred by chance. Yes, I know: you’ve heard it before – and so had I. And to his face I countered with all the usual objections. But one of his responses stayed with me.
“Look,” he said, “dismiss the idea of intelligent design if you like. But understand that if you do, you’ll need to embrace something truly farfetched: multiverse theory.”
And he was right. Well, maybe things aren’t quite as binary as that. But since it was first proposed in the 1950s by US physicist Hugh Everett, multiverse theory has won over a lot of high-calibre scientists, including Stephen Hawking.
Multiverse theory posits that what we think of as the universe (as everything there is) is really just one of many. The total number of universes might be finite, proponents say, or infinite. Either way, it’s a logical explanation for how it could be that the laws of our universe happen to be ideal for the formation of stars and planets, and the emergence of intelligent life. Because if you accept the notion that ours is one of many universes, and that most or all of the rest operate by a range of different laws and are, consequently,
