String Theory and Evidence of the Multiverse

[matrixrising]

It seems many people in Science have gravitated towards some form of a multiverse. Whether it's a Cyclical Universe or some version of the Many Worlds Interpretation. The question is where's the evidence? I do think there's some evidence that points to this conclusion. If you look at the work of Laura-Mersini Houghton a Cosmologist and Theoretical Physicist from UNC, she has amassed some interesting work in these areas.

She basically takes the landscape of String Theory of 10/500 false vacua that are entangled and she applies the quantum wave function across these vacua. She says signatures of this entanglement should be found in our universe because information about this entanglement could never be lost. When Decoherence occurs some of these vacua inflate into universes and some don't but they carry signatures of their initial state of entanglement. Here's more:

In 2006, Mersini-Houghton with collaborators predicted a series of observational imprints of her theory [4] for the birth of our high energy universe from the multiverse, by using the unitarity principle of quantum mechanics (no information loss). They predicted the existence of a giant void far away of size about 12 degrees in the southern hemisphere of the sky; the 'tilting' of the gravitational potential in the universe, which gives rise to a Dark Flow of structure, caused by superhorizon entanglement of our universe with all else in the multiverse; the suppression of the overall amplitude of inflationary fluctuations due to the same interaction of our Hubble volume with others in the multiverse, etc. A second void was predicted for the northern hemisphere of the sky as reported in the New Scientist.[5]

In 2007, Mersini-Houghton claimed that the observed CMB cold spot was "the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own",[6] just as she and her collaborator had predicted in her theory 8 months earlier.[7]

After the observational confirmation of the three predictions (the Void, Dark Flow and Sigma8) her work continues to attract international media attention, GCHEP/UNC, and Discover magazine, October 2009.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Mersini-Houghton

Here's her original paper called Cosmological Avatars of the Landscape II: CMB and LSS Signatures

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0612142

Here's a video where she goes over the evidence and she talks about how Planck's Satellite has confirmed some of her predictions.

http://iai.tv/video/how-to-find-a-multiverse

So we have predictions confirmed by observations, what's missing?

 

[atyy]

When people refer to the multiverse hypothesis, they are generally referring to something other than the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

The many-worlds interpretation is one of several interpretations of quantum mechanics. The various interpretations cannot be experimentally distinguished.

The multiverse hypothesis may be a prediction of string theory. The idea roughly is that just as quantum field theory predicts the concurrent existence of many different types of low energy materials like different crystal structures, string theory may predict the concurrent existence of many different types of universes.

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0610102 : "The structure of effective potentials responsible for multiple minima, metastability and transitions is central to a good deal of real world physics and chemistry. ... Thus, if we find multiple local minima of the effective potentials derived from string/M theory compactification, the appropriate interpretation is that string/M theory has multiple configurations, the vacua."

 

[AgentCachat]

We don't even have an accepted theory of quantum gravity yet. While there are good yarns of multiverses and many-worlds in science fiction, there is no evidence for them. One method was just reported for possibly verifying string theory by detecting variations from GR(I think). Until then we're all just having a good time speculating about the whichness of what.

 

[Chronos]

laura mersini-houghton is indulging in speculation. Planck data does not explicitly support it. The CMB 'cold spot' [her smoking gun evidence] remains controversial - re: http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.5527 and http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.5062.

 

[phinds]

We don't even have an accepted theory of quantum gravity yet. While there are good yarns of multiverses and many-worlds in science fiction, there is no evidence for them. One method was just reported for possibly verifying string theory by detecting variations from GR(I think). Until then we're all just having a good time speculating about the whichness of what.

+1 on that. Nice first post !