The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos

by Brian Greene

Much as a potent explanation for why the shop has your shoe size requires that the shelves be stocked with many different sizes, and much as a potent explanation for why there’s a planet situated at a bio-friendly distance from its host star requires planets orbiting their stars at many different distances, so a potent explanation of nature’s constants requires a vast assortment of universes endowed with many different values for those constants. Only in this setting—a multiverse, and a robust one at that—does anthropic reasoning have the capacity to make the mysterious mundane.* Clearly, then, the degree to which you are swayed by the anthropic approach depends on the degree to which you are convinced of its three essential assumptions: (1) our universe is part of a multiverse; (2) from universe to universe in the multiverse, the constants take on a broad range of possible values; and (3) for most variations of the constants away from the values we measure, life as we know it would fail to take hold.

Anthropic needz multiverses