Rethinking the universe: Groundbreaking theory proposed in 1997 suggests a 'multiverse'

Some top scientists are beginning to worry that a radical idea proposed in 1997 by three University of Delaware physicists may be right.

If it is, then it could debunk some of the discoveries physicists were hoping to make at the Large Hadron Collider, the huge, multi-billion-dollar particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland, at which researchers recently discovered the famous "Higgs boson."

It would also suggest that we might be living in a "multiverse"—a universe that is much bigger than was once thought and in which the laws of physics take different forms in different places.

An article, published by Simons Science News, explains some of this.

Linking to an influential paper by UD physics professors Stephen M. Barr, David Seckel, then-graduate student Vivek Agrawal, and John F. Donoghue, a professor and colleague at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the article examines the "principle of naturalness," which for decades has been thought to govern the size of the numbers appearing in the laws of physics.

Generally, whenever some quantity was found to be much smaller than what physicists had thought to be its "natural" value, some new force, mechanism, or symmetry was discovered that explained the anomaly.