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

by Brian Greene

Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has been a strong promoter of the Ultimate Multiverse (which he has called the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis), justifies this view through a related consideration. The deepest description of the universe should not require concepts whose meaning relies on human experience or interpretation. Reality transcends our existence and so shouldn’t, in any fundamental way, depend on ideas of our making. Tegmark’s view is that mathematics—thought of as collections of operations (like addition) that act on abstract sets of objects (like the integers), yielding various relations between them (like 1 + 2 = 3)—is precisely the language for expressing statements that shed human contagion. But what, then, could possibly distinguish a body of mathematics from the universe it depicts? Tegmark argues that the answer is nothing.