All across the multiverse

A recent paper by some Stanford physicists has taken a theoretical count of the possible number of universes in a multiverse. Yes I said that correctly! Imagine the whole thing starting as a immensly dense blob of everything, and then inflating like a balloon. As the surface area increases, so the theory goes, universes form in the space.

Is there any evidence for it? No, and there never will be, but the concept is a vital one for materialists who need to find an explanation for our 'just-so' universe. But just in case you are interested, the answer they came up with is 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 7!!!!!!

Well now we know!

The hardest question

Apparently Albert Einstein once said that ‘the hardest thing to understand is why we can understand anything at all.’ I think he was wrong. The hardest thing to understand is why should there be anything to understand in the first place?

There is nothing so unfathomable as existence. Why on earth, or anywhere else for that matter, should any thing exist? It’s ironic that the one thing that is most obviously true to all of us is also the most baffling. The question of the ultimate origin is an enigma for all of us; believer, atheist or agnostic alike. For the believer, where did God come from? For the atheist, where did the universe (or multiverse) come from? For the agnostic, where did that question come from?

Yet the one thing that is absolutely certain is that we do in actual fact exist, and for as long as there has been human thought there has been an urge to try and understand it.

Dinos of a feather

Here’s more on the evolutionary origin of birds from dinosaurs (where the archetypal fossil is Archaeopteryx!)

There’s been some controversy about the timing of the transitions – because the more transitional examples appear in younger rocks than less transitional ones – but that is most likely a quirk of the hap-hazard nature of fossilisation. Anyway this new find, Anchiornis huxleyi has helped shed some light. It’s a theropod dinosaur about the size of a cow and its around 151-161 million years old, which makes it a few million years older than Archaeopteryx. That’s the important point because it re-addresses the temporal discrepancies.

One other thing, it even has feathers on it’s feet!