We began by thinking that we were the center of the universe. Then we saw we weren't, nor was the sun, or the galaxy. At this point, why should we think that the universe is the one and all? Why can't there be many universes? The Harlem Renaissance poet William Waring Cuney famously described the dishwater in the poem "No Images" as unable to return the image of a hardworking woman. As a consequence, she doesn't "know her beauty" or the glory of her "brown body." But the soapy dishwater might have made her think about the possibility of multiverses. What if our universe was like one of those bubbles in the kitchen sink? One among many big and small bubbles? Some are forming. Some are about to pop. Some are on top of other bubbles. Is it even possible to count all of them? Is the infinite in a kitchen sink filled with soapsuds?
Stephen Hawking was on this tip before he died last week. His last big paper, according to the Sunday Times was to expand the cosmic to beyond the universe, which, by the way is also expanding.
It's reported that the paper isn't so much about the multiverse as how "to transform the idea of a multiverse into a testable scientific framework." This might be possible with a deep-space probe that can make certain measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), or relic radiation, the birth of the universe that we are still bathed in. (I mentioned the CMB in a post about Hawking that includes a description of a scene in the movie Fargo.)
The research, submitted two weeks ago, sets out the maths needed for a space probe to find experimental evidence for the existence of a “multiverse”. This is the idea that our cosmos is only one of many universes. If such evidence had been found while he was alive, it might have put Hawking in line for the Nobel prize he had desired for so long.
The paper was completed two weeks before Hawking became disassociated and reassociated as other things in a universe that appears to be accessible to animals or beings that have the power of reflection.
