When studied deeply, down at the subatomic level of particle physics, the material world we live in appears to be nothing more substantial than wisps of smoke. There’s hardly anything there! Everything that seems solid and hard to the touch consists mostly of space. The vast open spaces between particles is startling. Even the particles [...]
In this week’s episode of “Flash Forward” (ABC), we learn about Dyson Frost’s “Garden of Forking Paths,” an enormous map sketched in chalk detailing multiple forks in his travels through time. Frost is in search of alternate futures, mostly a future where he lives past a particular date, but also a future where the whole [...]
Physicist Sean Carroll is hunting for the ultimate theory; he wants to explain the arrow of time.
We remember the past but we don’t remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet into an egg. … The [...]
The Bear has just finished reading Alex Vilenkin’s Many Worlds In One (Hill and Wang, 2006). The book is subtitled “The Search for Other Universes” and describes Vilenkin’s theory of infinitely many island universes emerging through a process of quantum tunneling out of nothing, in a sea of finite unbounded inflationary spacetime which has no [...]
Here is something I have been thinking about for many many years (according to my own notebooks, as long ago as the late 1970s), but I credit the writer, artist and inventor Doug Yerchey with publishing the idea in a 2002 article on the World Mysteries web site. He begins by discussing the peculiar duality [...]
