From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Jun 24 2003 - 20:58:51 MDT
Infinite Universe Summary - An Introduction
I finally had time to finish all the posts in the
April thread "Infinite Universe" that erupted in
response to Tegmark's Scientific American article
and his earlier one at
http://it.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0302131
Many thanks to "geodesicallyincomplete" and other
posters who educated me (I hope) on this topic.
I wish to summarize my own views on the matter,
and I think that those views reflect the majority
position on this forum, (perhaps weighted by
reputation). Also, however, I am assuming that
Tegmark is correct in his major assessment (though
I may quibble over terminology here and there).
I find that the word "multiverse" invites confusion
between a set and its members, and I tend to avoid it.
I also use "AB" for "After Bang", and don't know why
no one else seems to use this convenient abbreviation.
Brief Overview of Levels:
Level 1: Collection of overlapping Hubble volumes, our
entire traditional universe with its infinitely
many galaxies.
Level 2: Collection of different inflationary bubbles,
including one that is our universe.
Level 3: Consists of a collection of different
Deutschian/Everettian quantum mechanical
variants called MWI parallel universes.
Level 4: Consists of a collection of different
mathematical structures.
Naming Proposals:
I say that our level one universe should be named
"Bruno" in honor of the man who in our history who
first claimed that there are infinitely many suns,
each with a solar system.
In Eliezer Yudkovsky's opinion, our particular level
four universe (the level three multiverse in which we
live) should be named "Bayesia", on account of its
mathematical properties.
I see no point to naming the level 2 set of
inflationary bubbles, one of which is Bruno,
and do not see why the entire collection of
entities at level 4 needs a name, because
that's all there is.
If you find that I appear to be disagreeing substantially
with Tegmark or "geodesicallyincomplete" (whose posts were
not actually in the same thread, but at the same time in
"expansion of the universe") in my next post---a summary
of our level one infinite universe---I would very much
appreciate being informed.
Lee Corbin
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