Barbelo

The promiscuous nature of the multiverse may be unappealing (William James, who coined the word, called the multiverse a ‘harlot’), but it is hard to eliminate. As a final insult to unity, the laws of quantum mechanics indicate that the universe is continually splitting into multiple histories or ‘worlds,’ out of which the world that…

…the future of the cosmos is perhaps bright and fecund, but do not bother asking about going any deeper into the past. We might never know what happened before inflation, at the very beginning, because inflation erases everything that came before it. All the chaos and randomness of the primordial moment are swept away, forever…

Quantum fluctuations are, at their root, completely a-causal, in the sense that cause and effect… is not a part of how these fluctuations work… So in the big bang, the establishment of ‘law’ came after the event itself, but of course even the concept of time and causality may not have been quite the same…