“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.”
Albert Einstein was fond of saying that “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” What if our world, our universe, following Einstein’s insight, is the result of a quantum-physics experiment performed by some ancient hyper-advanced alien civilization. A civilization that, as astrophysicist Paul Davies speculates, may exist beyond matter.
“Ancient black holes would give us access to physics we would never otherwise be able to do,” wrote Dan Hooper, head of the theoretical astrophysics group at Fermilab, in an email to The Daily Galaxy. If primordial black holes are real, they’d have potential to solve a whole host of the biggest problems in cosmology, not the least being the mystery of dark matter, considered to be the backbone to the structure of the universe.
“There is probably no way to tell whether the mysteries faced by cosmologists today are the signs of a coming scientific revolution or merely the last few loose ends of an incredibly successful scientific endeavor. There is no question that we have made incredible progress in understanding our universe, its history, and its origin,” says Dan Hooper, a senior scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory about 40 miles west of Chicago and a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago.
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