Professor of Religion Mary Jane Rubenstein explores the current popularity of the idea of the multiverse and debates with Harvard String Theorist Cumrun Vafa why this matters today. #multiverse #gravity #iaitv #physics #stringtheory #universe
Talk of other universes has become fashionable amongst physicists and is popular with the public. But the numbers seem hardly credible: string theory predicts 10500 parallel universes and some argue that the very idea of other universes is nonsensical. Should we recognise ours as the only universe and give up on others as fantasy science? Or is slipping through a worm hole into another universe a credible reality rather than a Hollywood fairytale?
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Cumrun Vafa: Cumrun Vafa is a string theorist from Harvard University. He is the recipient of the 2008 Dirac Medal and the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.
Mary Jane Rubenstein: Mary-Jane Rubenstein is Professor of Religion at Wesleyan University. She is the author of Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (2009) Worlds without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (2014), and Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (2018).
John Ellis: John Ellis currently holds the Clerk Maxwell Professorship of Theoretical Physics at King's College in London. He is very active in efforts to understand the Higgs particle discovered recently at CERN, as well as its implications for possible new physics such as dark matter and supersymmetry. John Ellis was awarded the Maxwell Medal (1982) and the Paul Dirac Prize (2005) by the Institute of Physics.
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