A Profusion Of Place | Part I: Of Unity And Philosophy
by Steven Gussman 1 Physicist Max Tegmark's Our Mathematical Universe is a hodge-podge, part popular astronomy book, part memoir, and part creative playground for exploring new ideas. His account of mainstream physics and astronomy sheds light on the subject in a unique way, and I appreciate that he is willing to directly recognize the obvious big questions. 2 The book ultimately revolves around Tegmark's unlikely idea of the most expansive multiverse imaginable, and several arguments from fundamental physics to cognitive psychology are employed to get there. Like many of us, Tegmark is dissatisfied with standard quantum physics, but he (and increasingly his colleagues in physics) embraces a cure that's worse than the disease in the Everettian “many worlds” multiverse interpretation, which simply moves the central problem without answering it. 3 By taking advantage of the most simple models of recent scientific ideas in need of more empirical evidenc