The Comparison to the Multiverse Story

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I suspect strongly that in most known principled ways of comparing the likelihood of those two possibilities, the empty universe is going to come out more likely. I will go on the record as saying that would be great and I don't believe you. But we can talk about that. Okay. You should be skeptical. I am skeptical. I think that even I could claim that you can specify to whatever level of detail you want the world around us to 100,000 parsecs in every direction surrounded by vacuum and everything is perfectly fine. That's not true. It doesn't matter how carefully I specify my current observations here in the Big Bang. I can always embed them in a universe sorry here

Is there a multiverse, and if so, how should we think of ourselves within it? In many modern cosmological models, the universe includes more than one realm, with possibly different laws of physics, and these realms may or may not include intelligent observers. There is a longstanding puzzle about how, in such a scenario, we should calculate what we, as presumably intelligent observers ourselves, should expect to see. Today's guest, Thomas Hertog, is a physicist and longstanding collaborator of Stephen Hawking. They worked together (often with James Hartle) to address these questions, and the work is still ongoing.

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Thomas Hertog received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge. He is currently a professor of theoretical physics at KU Leuven. His new book is On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory.

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