The final twist in this saga is that almost all multiverse theories predict the existence of infinitely many duplicate cosmic regions, including duplicate Earths and duplicate Guardian readers. There will also exist all possible variations on this theme.The Guardian article is by Paul Davies, who writes a lot of “popular science” stuff. He knows what he’s talking about and he usually writes well, but this piece looks like a dog’s dinner to me. I suspect it’s been trimmed to fit by someone at the Guardian.
I had as much difficulty making sense of it as Norm Geras did. To me it seemed like some weird conflation of Guth's bubble universes, the anthropic principle and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
I was half expecting Schrodinger’s cat to turn up at some point.
Then, about two thirds of the way through the article, I spotted Max Tegmark’s name and I started to smile. Don’t get me wrong, Tegmark is a highly reputable cosmologist; he publishes a lot of papers and is well respected, but he also has a lively sense of humour.
Davies’ piece for the Guardian looks to be based on an article Tegmark wrote for Scientific American back in May.
It’s one of his “wacky ones”.
