"The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits." G.K. Chesterton

Monday, March 15, 2010

Do it yourself Universe kit

Genetical engineering is often labeled as an activity akin to "Playing God". It is nothing, however to what the physicists get up to. This is an exerpt from an interview with Alan Guth - the creator of the "Inflation" model which describes the behavior of the universe shortly after the Big Bang. Shortly means within 10^-35sec of the Big Bang:

Given the inflationary model, it becomes very tempting to ask whether, in principle, it's possible to create a universe in the laboratory — or a universe in your backyard — by man-made processes.
The first question to look at is what would happen if you had a small patch of inflationary universe in the midst of our universe, never mind how it might have gotten there. Let's pretend that it exists, and ask how it evolves. It turns out that if this patch is big enough, it will grow to become a new universe, but it does this in a very strange way. It doesn't — and this is very important for environmental purposes — displace our universe. Instead, the patch forms a wormhole and slips through it. From our universe, it always appears very small and looks more or less like an ordinary black hole. But on the inside, the new universe is expanding and can become arbitrarily large, creating new space as it grows. It can easily become large enough to encompass a universe like the one we see. In a very short length of time, a small fraction of a second, it completely pinches off from our universe and becomes a totally isolated new universe.