“In a sense, the galaxy hardest for us to see is our own,” wrote Issac Assimov. “For one thing, we are imprisoned within it, while the others can be viewed as a whole from outside… . Furthermore, we are far out from the center, and to make matters worse, we lie in a spiral arm clogged with dust. In other words, we are on a low roof on the outskirts of the city on a foggy day.”
In has been said that Newton gave us answers; Stephen Hawking gave us questions. A trio of scientists are one step closer to resolving the black-hole information paradox, one of the most intriguing physics mysteries of our time.
“I believe we exist in a multiverse of universes,” says theoretical physicist, Michio Kaku,“ underscoring the intriguing debate over the past decade among some the planet’s leading cosmologists and physicists, including 2020 Nobel-Prize laureate, Roger Penrose, about signs that a prior universe that may exist in the ancient afterglow from the Big Bang.
“If space is truly infinite,” observes Dan Hooper, head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in At the Edge of Time, “the implications are staggering. Within an infinite expanse of space, it would be hard to see any reason why there would not be an infinite number of galaxies, stars, and planets, and even an infinite number of intelligent or conscious beings, scattered throughout this limitless volume. That is the thing about infinity: it takes things that are otherwise very unlikely and makes them all inevitable.”
