Khám phá vũ trụ và những bí ẩn chưa được giải đáp
Khám phá bí ẩn: Vũ trụ là sản phẩm của ý thức? - DKN.TV
Avi Loeb, chủ tịch tiền nhiệm Khoa Thiên văn học của Đại học Harvard, giám đốc Sáng kiến ​​Lỗ đen (Black Hole Initiative) của Harvard, và Sở ...
“Was our university created in a Laboratory?”
Cách đây một thời gian, tạp chí danh tiếng của Mỹ là Scientific American (Người Mỹ khoa học) đã đăng một bài báo chuyên đề có tên <anchor>“Was our university created in a Laboratory?”</anchor> (Liệu vũ trụ của chúng ta được tạo ra trong một phòng thí nghiệm?). Bài báo đưa ra một giả thuyết bom tấn rằng vũ trụ mà chúng ta đang sống có thể là do sinh mệnh cao tầng tạo ra. Tác giả của bài báo này không hề tầm thường, ông là Avi Loeb, chủ tịch tiền nhiệm Khoa Thiên văn học của Đại học Harvard, giám đốc Sáng kiến ​​Lỗ đen (Black Hole Initiative) của Harvard, và Sở trưởng Sở nghiên cứu Lý luận và Tính toán Vật lý Thiên thể Harvard-Smith.
Was Our Universe Created in a Laboratory? | Scientific American
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October 15, 2021

4 min read

# Was Our Universe Created in a Laboratory?

Developing quantum-gravity technologies may elevate us to a “class A” civilization, capable of creating a baby universe

Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543) captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

The biggest mystery concerning the history of our universe is what happened before the big bang. Where did our universe come from? Nearly a century ago, Albert Einstein searched for steady-state alternatives to the big bang model because a beginning in time was not philosophically satisfying in his mind.

A less explored possibility is that our universe was created in the laboratory of an advanced technological civilization. Since our universe has a flat geometry with a zero net energy, an advanced civilization could have developed a technology that created a baby universe out of nothing through quantum tunneling.

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This possible origin story unifies the religious notion of a creator with the secular notion of quantum gravity. We do not possess a predictive theory that combines the two pillars of modern physics: quantum mechanics and gravity. But a more advanced civilization might have accomplished this feat and mastered the technology of creating baby universes. If that happened, then not only could it account for the origin of our universe but it would also suggest that a universe like our own—which in this picture hosts an advanced technological civilization that gives birth to a new flat universe—is like a biological system that maintains the longevity of its genetic material through multiple generations.

If so, our universe was not selected for us to exist in it—as suggested by conventional  anthropic reasoning—but rather, it was selected such that it would give rise to civilizations which are much more advanced than we are. Those “smarter kids on our cosmic block”— which are capable of developing the technology needed to produce baby universes—are the drivers of the cosmic Darwinian selection process, whereas we cannot enable, as of yet, the rebirth of the cosmic conditions that led to our existence. One way to put it is that our civilization is still cosmologically sterile since we cannot reproduce the world that made us.

With this perspective, the technological level of civilizations should not be gauged by how much power they tap, as suggested by the scale envisioned in 1964 by Nikolai Kardashev.  Instead, it should be measured by the ability of a civilization to reproduce the astrophysical conditions that led to its existence.

As of now, we are a low-level technological civilization, graded class C on the cosmic scale, since we are unable to recreate even the habitable conditions on our planet for when the sun will die. Even worse, we may be labeled class D since we are carelessly destroying the natural habitat on Earth through climate change, driven by our technologies.  A class B civilization could adjust the conditions in its immediate environment to be independent of its host star. A civilization ranked class A could recreate the cosmic conditions that gave rise to its existence, namely produce a baby universe in a laboratory.

Achieving the distinction of class A civilization is nontrivial by the measures of physics as we know it. The related challenges, such as producing a large enough density of dark energy within a small region, already have been discussed in the scientific literature.

Since a self-replicating universe only needs to possess a single class A civilization, and having many more is much less likely, the most common universe would be the one that just barely makes class A civilizations. Anything better than this minimum requirement is much less likely to occur because it requires additional rare circumstances and does not provide a greater evolutionary benefit for the Darwinian selection process of baby universes.

The possibility that our civilization is not a particularly smart one should not take us by surprise. When I tell students at Harvard University that half of them are below the median of their class, they get upset. The stubborn reality might well be that we are statistically at the center of the bell-shaped probability distribution of our class of intelligent life-forms in the cosmos, even when taking into account our celebrated discovery of the Higgs boson by the Large Hadron Collider.

We must allow ourselves to look humbly through new telescopes, as envisioned by the recently announced Galileo Project, and search for smarter kids on our cosmic block. Otherwise, our ego trip may not end well, similarly to the experience of the dinosaurs, which dominated Earth until an object from space tarnished their illusion.

Avi Loeb is former chair (2011-2020) of the astronomy department at Harvard University, founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He also chairs the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies and the advisory board for the Breakthrough Starshot project, and is a member of President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Loeb is the bestselling author of Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

SA Space & Physics Vol 4 Issue 6 This article was originally published with the title “Was Our Universe Created in a Laboratory?” in_SA Space & Physics_ Vol. 4 No. 6(December 2021)

doi:10.1038/scientificamerican122021-5Xo2L7siZIlSzNqU4NjhmD

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