Submitted by
Dave Masko on 2011-08-31
“How do you know you’re reading this sentence, and not floating in a vat on a distant planet, with alien scientists stimulating your brain to produce the thoughts and experiences you deem real," asks one of the world's foremost physicists."
Image source of this view from “The Matrix,” a 1999 film with Keanu “Neo” Reeves -- in what’s been called “the famous lobby scene” -- that’s considered by many to be one of the greatest action scenes in film history: Wikipedia
Professor Brian Greene says “these issues are central to epistemology, a philosophical subfield that asks what constitutes knowledge, how we acquire it, and how sure we are that we have it? “Think of the universe like a deck of cards,” adds Greene while explaining “parallel universes” and “the deep laws of the cosmos,” and why there’s alien life and “another life” in what “popular culture has brought to a wide audience in the films such as The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, and Vanilla Sky. He then asks: “How do you know you’re not hooked into the Matrix?”
The Matrix is a 1999 science fiction-action film featuring Keanu Reeves -- in the photo that accompanies this story – that’s gained resurgence in Europe this summer with a new wave of university students discovering it. The Matrix is about a future where reality that’s perceived by most humans is actually a simulated reality created by sentient machines from an alien race whose job is to pacify and subdue the humans with technology. Thus, the “Matrix” is a film fan favorite for those who enjoy the cyberpunk and hacker subcultures, where philosophical and religious ideas – such as “the brain in the vat thought experiment.”
Green and Einstein think you “can’t know for sure” when it comes to parallel universes
“The bottom line is that you can’t know for sure. You engage the world through your senses, which stimulate your brain in ways your neural circuitry has evolved to interpret. If someone (alien life forms) artificially stimulates your brain so as to elicit electrical crackles exactly like those produced by eating pizza, reading this sentence, or skydiving, the experience will be indistinguishable from the real thing. Experience is dictated by brain processes, not by what activates those processes,” writes Greene in his new book that’s been compared to the writing of Albert Einstein.
"Now, if you shuffle that deck, there's just so many orderings that can happen. If you shuffle that deck enough times, the orders will have to repeat. Similarly, with an infinite universe and only a finite number of complexions of matter, the way in which matter arranges itself has to repeat,” explained Greene, the author of the new bestseller “The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos” in a recent NPR interview.
Greene, a foremost physicist, also wrote The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos. Greene received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He served on the physics faculty of Cornell University and Columbia University as “professor of physics and mathematics.” Greene is a colleague of Stephen Hawking and an expert on the work of Albert Einstein.
Today, Professor Greene says he’s tackling the existence of multiple universes in his latest book, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos.
Recent discoveries in physics and astronomy, he says, point to the idea that our universe may be one of many universes populating a grander multiverse.
"You almost can't avoid having some version of the multiverse in your studies if you push deeply enough in the mathematical descriptions of the physical universe," he says. "There are many of us thinking of one version of parallel universe theory or another. If it's all a lot of nonsense, then it's a lot of wasted effort going into this far-out idea. But if this idea is correct, it is a fantastic upheaval in our understanding,” added Professor Greene during the NPR interview.
Stephen Hawking gets beyond UFOs and alien life with views on parallel universes
To help make the concepts of parallel universes accessible because of the challenging nature of new beliefs, the Washington Post featured a recent book review that features Stephen Hawking’s new book: “In other words,” writes Stephen Hawking, “not only is the Earth just one of several planets in our solar system and the Milky Way one of billions of galaxies, but our known universe itself is just one among uncounted billions of universes. It's a startling replay of the Copernican Revolution.”
The Washington Post review also noted Hawking’s strong views on parallel universes: “The conclusions are groundbreaking. Of all the possible universes, some must have laws that allow the appearance of life. The fact that we are here already tells us that we are in that corner of the multiverse. In this way, all origin questions are answered by pointing to the huge number of possible universes and saying that some of them have the properties that allow the existence of life, just by chance,” writes Hawking in the new book “The Grand Design.”
A foremost physicist, Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow are now trying to explain the now commonly held view that other life exists in the universe; and there are “Parallel Universes.”
What a parallel universe really means, they ask.
Are you in one now, they also ask.
Hawking making final warnings at a senior age and state in life
Hawking, who recently warned of “not trying to contact alien life because they are probably hostile,” needs no introduction in ufology circles, and Mlodinow, said a recent Washington Post review of The Grand Design. It noted how “Mlodinow is a Caltech physicist with a string of excellent books to his credit. Both Hawking and Mlodinow have taken on that ultimate question in a somewhat more rigorous form by asking three related ones:
Why is there something instead of nothing?
Why do we exist?
Why does this particular set of laws govern our universe and not some other set?
In recent interviews, Hawking also points to Einstein and his views on parallel universes.
What now been dubbed as common rules, says Greene, about the deep laws of the cosmos; while other top physicists view this new guidance as: “parallel universes that also have human life forms and Earthly features.”
“The cosmos does not have just a single existence or history, but rather that every possible history of the universe exists simultaneously,” writes Hawking, while noting “the theory of everything theory, if confirmed, will be the unified theory that Einstein was looking for, and the ultimate triumph of human reason.”
Hawking moves on from the “alien question” to how will the Earth handle an alien threat
In “The Grand Design,” Hawkins asks fundamental questions about the origins of the universe, but adds: it comes back to “extraterrestrials.”
Extraterrestrial life is defined as a term from the Latin words: extra "beyond", or "not of", and terrestris "of or belonging to Earth" and is also defined as life that does not originate from Earth, but from other parts of the universe or even parallel universes.
In turn, Hawkins and Leonard Miodinow present what “they call the most recent scientific thinking about the mysteries of the universe.” In addition, Hawking has publically stated that “alien life exists,” and that we on Earth should “not be trying to get their attention.”
In his new book’s introduction, Hawking writes -- perhaps, he says, for the last time -- that “scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge,” while also adding that there is “seemingly bizarre behavior observed in both the traditional conception of the universe and in parallel universes.
