Word: cosmos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Juliette Beck, 27, is as close to a bigwig as the movement has, but even she feels like a tiny link in the wired cosmos of antiglobalism. An organizer for Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based human-rights group, Beck arrived in Washington fresh from a 20-city road show that was organized largely via e-mail. "We got housing and food for nine people on the road," she says. "The events and the nonviolence training and the political theater--the Internet made it possible." Beck, who planned to demonstrate in costume along with 20 others in her "affinity group...
...mere 30 billion light-years across, that we can see. But then scientists, including the Russian emigre Andrei Linde, realized that this inflation was more flexible than anyone had thought. Energy fields of early-universe intensity could arise purely by chance in subatomic-size regions of even a normal cosmos...
...inflationary bubble that formed in a pre-existing universe--an arena better described as a metauniverse, or metaverse. Other, parallel bubbles could have formed just as easily. (If two expanding bubbles somehow met, the result would be a wall of fiery energy spanning one side of the cosmos. No evidence of that to date...
...bubbles of inflation could percolate in a pre-existing metaverse, they might also spring forth from our cosmos. New universes could be sprouting from ours all the time, in fact spewing out into unimaginable dimensions to evolve along their own paths. These universes might have laws of physics dramatically different from our own--gravity so powerful that they collapse almost instantly, or so weak that stars can never form, to give just two examples. And they could give birth in turn to other universes, creating a metaverse in which universes bud off of universes in an endlessly self-reproducing fashion...
...gets even more bizarre. According to Princeton astrophysicist J. Richard Gott, the flow of time loses its meaning when you hop from one universe to another. In the timeless metaverse, in fact, a baby cosmos could beget a baby that would beget a baby that might ultimately give birth to the universe that started it all. "It's quite possible," says Gott, "that the universe could end up being its own great-grandmother...