Word: physicist
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Helping Phil conceive and edit the issue were senior writers Michael Lemonick and Jeffrey Kluger. Mike, who has written two books (the most recent: Other Worlds) and whose physicist dad served as dean of Princeton's faculty for 17 years, wrote about the chances of discovering another universe. "What appealed to me most about this project was that many of the questions are so basic that a child might ask them yet so profound and difficult that our writers felt challenged by them...
That's plenty of ifs for skeptical scientists to swallow. As physicist Enrico Fermi liked to say, if there are so many extraterrestrials out there, why haven't we heard from them...
...wriggling in a hyperspace of 10 (or more) dimensions. Unfortunately, these hypothetical strings are so small that it would take a particle accelerator the size of the Milky Way to detect them! I am not alone in fearing that string theorists are not really practicing science anymore; one leading physicist has derided string theory as "medieval theology." Paul, here is persuasive evidence of science's plight...
Precisely what that fundamental uncertainty tells us about the basic nature of the subatomic world is a question theorists have been wrestling with for decades. The great Danish physicist Niels Bohr, for example, believed that before you pinned a particle down by measuring it, the particle was literally in several places at once. The act of measurement, he suggested, forced the particle to choose one location over all the others...
...that's true, then trillions of these baby universes exist, for that's how many black holes are believed to inhabit our cosmos. And those are just the naturally occurring ones; baby universes could in principle be manufactured as well. M.I.T. physicist Alan Guth realized in the late '80s that you might create a baby universe in the lab from just a few pounds' worth of matter by compressing the stuff to black-hole density...