The previous post on the Philosophy and Cosmology conference in Oxford was growing to unseemly length, so I'll give each of the three days its separate post. Monday morning: The Case for Multiverses
9:00: We start today as we ended yesterday: with a talk by Martin Rees, who has done quite a bit to popularize the idea of a multiverse. He wants to argue that thinking about the multiverse doesn't represent any sort of departure from the usual way we do science. The Big Bang model, from 1 second to today, is as uncontroversial as anything a geologist does. Easily falsifiable, but it passes all tests. How far does the domain of physical cosmology extend? We only see the universe out to the microwave background, but nothing happens out there -- it seems pretty uniform, suggesting that conditions inside extend pretty far outside. Could be very far, but hard to ...
