{"id":9387,"date":"2005-12-15T14:13:12","date_gmt":"2005-12-15T19:13:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2005\/12\/15\/susskind-interview\/"},"modified":"2005-12-15T14:13:12","modified_gmt":"2005-12-15T19:13:12","slug":"susskind-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2005\/12\/15\/susskind-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Susskind interview"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While we&#8217;re getting the multiverse out of our system, let me point to this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/channel\/opinion\/mg18825305.800.html\">interview with Leonard Susskind<\/a> by Amanda Gefter over at New Scientist (also noted at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=312\">Not Even Wrong<\/a>).  I&#8217;ve talked with Amanda before, about <a href=\"http:\/\/preposterousuniverse.blogspot.com\/2004\/08\/testing-general-relativity.html\">testing general relativity<\/a> among other things, and she was nice enough to forward the introduction to the interview, which appears in the print edition but was omitted online.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Ever since Albert Einstein wondered whether the world might have been different, physicists have been searching for a &#8220;theory of everything&#8221; to explain why the universe is exactly the way it is. But one of today&#8217;s leading candidates, string theory, is in trouble. A growing number of physicists claim it is ill-defined, based on crude assumptions and hasn&#8217;t got us any closer to a theory of everything. Something fundamental is missing, they say (see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/channel\/fundamentals\/mg18825293.700.html\">New Scientist, 10 December, p 5<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>The main complaint is that rather than describing one universe, the theory describes some 10<sup>500<\/sup>, each with different kinds of particles, different constants of nature, even different laws of physics. But physicist Leonard Susskind, who invented string theory, sees this huge &#8220;landscape&#8221; of universes not as a problem, but as a solution.<\/p>\n<p>If all these universes actually exist, forming a huge &#8220;multiverse,&#8221; then maybe physicists can explain the way things are after all. According to Susskind, the existence of a multiverse could answer the most perplexing question in physics: why the value of the cosmological constant, which describes how rapidly the expansion of the universe is accelerating, appears improbably fine-tuned to allow life to exist. A little bigger and the universe would have expanded too fast for galaxies to form; a little smaller and it would have collapsed into a black hole. With an infinite number of universes, says Susskind, there is bound to be one with a cosmological constant like ours.<\/p>\n<p>The idea is controversial, because it changes how physics is done, and it means that the basic features of our universe are just a random luck of the draw. He explains to Amanda Gefter why he&#8217;s defending it, and why it&#8217;s a possibility we simply can&#8217;t ignore.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While we&#8217;re getting the multiverse out of our system, let me point to this interview with Leonard Susskind by Amanda Gefter over at New Scientist (also noted at Not Even Wrong). I&#8217;ve talked with Amanda before, about testing general relativity among other things, and she was nice enough to forward the introduction to the interview, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9387\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}