Washington, Jan 13 (Inditop.com) The thought that life could exist in universes outside our own is all in a day’s work for Alejandro Jenkins, postdoctoral associate in theoretical high-energy physics at the Florida State University (FSU).
His thoughts on the hypothetical “multiverse” — a mega-universe full of smaller universes, including our own — are now receiving global attention, thanks to a study he conducted with another colleague.
Jenkins and co-writer Gilad Perez, theorist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, discuss a provocative hypothesis known as the anthropic principle.
“Our lives here on Earth — in fact, everything we see and know about the universe around us — depend on a precise set of conditions that makes us possible,” Jenkins says.
“For example, if the fundamental forces that shape matter in our universe were altered even slightly, it’s conceivable that atoms never would have formed, or that carbon, which is considered a basic building block of life as we know it, wouldn’t exist,” he says.
“So how is it that such a perfect balance exists? Some would attribute it to God, but of course, that is outside the realm of physics.
“The theory of cosmic inflation, which was developed in the 1980s in order to solve certain puzzles about the structure of our universe, predicts that ours is just one of countless universes to emerge from the same primordial vacuum,” he says.
Jenkins says that there is no way of seeing those other universes, although many of the other predictions of cosmic inflation have recently been corroborated by astrophysical measurements.
Given some of science’s current ideas about high-energy physics, it is plausible that those other universes might each have different physical interactions.
“So perhaps it’s no mystery that we would happen to occupy the rare universe in which conditions are just right to make life possible.
“What theorists like Perez and I do is tweak the calculations of the fundamental forces in order to predict the resulting effects on possible, alternative universes,” Jenkins says.
“Some of these results are easy to predict; for example, if there was no electromagnetic force, there would be no atoms and no chemical bonds. And without gravity, matter would not coalesce into planets, stars and galaxies.
“What is surprising about our results is that we found conditions that, while very different from those of our own universe, nevertheless might allow – again, at least hypothetically – for the existence of life. (What that life would look like is another story entirely.)” adds Jenkins, according to an FSU release.
This actually brings into question the usefulness of the anthropic principle when applied to particle physics and might force us to think more carefully about what the multiverse would actually contain.
The study “Looking for Life in the Multiverse” has been featured as a cover story in January edition of the Scientific American.
