Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

Alan Guth on the Multiverse

MIT’s Alan Guth, who is famous for proposing an inflationary model for the universe, a refinement of the Big Bang theory, that most cosmologists now accept, humorously yet seriously, illustrated the idea in a BBC roundtable discussion with several prominent cosmologists and theoretical physicists in 2002:

I in fact have worked with several other people for some period of time on the question of whether or not it's in principle possible to create a new universe in the laboratory. Whether or not it really works we don't know for sure. It looks like it probably would work. It's actually safe to create a universe in your basement. It would not displace the universe around it even though it would grow tremendously. It would actually create its own space as it grows and in fact in a very short fraction of a second it would splice itself off completely from our Universe and evolve as an isolated closed universe growing to cosmic proportions without displacing any of the territory that we currently lay claim to. (9)

A couple of other quotes from Guth at the same roundtable give us a more complete picture:

1)      Essentially anything that can happen does happen in one of the alternatives which means that superimposed on top of the Universe that we know of is an alternative universe where Al Gore is President and Elvis Presley is still alive.

2)      It [sic] may not all have life, but some fraction of them will have life and whatever that fraction is if there's an infinite number of these universes there'll be an infinite number of universes that have living civilisations.