Weiye Loh's Library tagged Cosmology →  View Popular, Search in Google

Perhaps the trouble started with Theodozius Dobzhansky, one of the fathers of modern evolutionary theory, who famously said that nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution (the phrase is, in fact, approvingly quoted by Pross). Problem is, Dobzhansky was writing for an audience of science high school teachers, and his statement is patently wrong, as an even cursory examination of the history of biology makes clear. For instance, developmental biologists had done a lot of highly fruitful research throughout the 19th and 20th centuries even as they ignored Darwin. And molecular biologists made spectacular progress from the 1950’s though the onset of the 21st century, again pretty much completing ignoring evolution. This is not to say that evolutionary theory doesn’t help in understanding developmental and molecular systems, but it is a stretch of the record to make claims such as those of Dobzhansky. (It would be like saying, for instance, that nothing makes sense in physics except in the light of quantum mechanics. Plenty of things in physics make perfect sense even as one brackets quantum mechanics and considers it a background theory.)

Of course, Darwinian evolution is indeed applicable to some non biological systems, particularly to so-called genetic algorithms, a type of evolving computer program whose properties have been studied by computational scientists over the past few decades. Indeed, genetic algorithms mimic biological evolution so closely that a number of population geneticists I know have been annoyed by repeated claims of computer scientists to have discovered this or that principle describing such systems, apparently without realizing that many of those discoveries had already been made by theoretical population geneticists decades earlier.

In a first attempt to find observational evidence of the multivers, the team from London and Canada is using a computer algorithm to survey the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation left over from the Big Bang in search of disk-like patterns where our bubble may have collided with other bubbles. The CMB data from NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) hasn’t given them enough information to either confirm or rule out any collisions, but new data (available to the public in 2013) from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite will help them further their search.

Greene said in his interview with NPR that another source of observational evidence of the multiverse could be the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. String theory predicts that each universe is on its own “membrane,” and according to Greene, we can think of the multiverse as a cosmic loaf of bread where each slice is a separate universe. When scientists at the LHC smash protons into each other at unbelievable speeds, he said, it’s possible that remnants of the collisions could spin off of our slice of bread, leaving less energy after the collision than before it, which would otherwise be impossible according to the law of conservation of energy.