Multiversed

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Many thanks to Sabine Hossenfelder for her efforts to debunk the attempt to use Hawking’s death as a platform for multiverse hype. [..] To summarize the problem, there are loads of news stories out there telling the public that Stephen Hawking’s ‘breathtaking’ final multiverse theory completed two weeks before he died, Stephen Hawking’s Final Paper Proposes Way to Detect the ‘Multiverse’, etc., etc. Cosmologist Carlos Frenk and theorist Thomas Hertog seem to be among those encouraging this nonsense.

This is all based on this recent paper by Hawking and Hertog, which contains nothing like a way to “detect the ‘Multiverse’”. It’s a toy model of bubble universe formation, one the authors admit they can’t even solve:[..]

Their calculations inspire them to state: “… we conjecture that eternal inflation produces universes that are relatively regular on the largest scales”, but this is just an extremely vague conjecture without much backing it. Using it to get press stories published claiming to have found a way to “detect the ‘Multiverse’” is just absurd, and it’s sad to see Hawking’s passing memorialized with a cloud of ridiculous hype.

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But.. but..  in scifi people go to a different universe all the time. Evil Spock comes in with a goatee wearing leather pants with a butt cutout. You are telling me this is not possible?

The moral of the story is - don’t believe everything you read, especially if it is on mainstream media.