"I would like to talk about a very serious embarrassment," said Mario Livio, a proclaimed scientist and author, at a panel at the World Science Festival in New York City last month.
With three other prominent astrophysicists on the panel, Livio delved into one of the most confounding (and embarrassing) problems in modern astrophysics, which led to a discussion of whether or not our universe might be just one of an infinite number of multiverses— and whether a theory of the multiverse is good or bad for science.
The embarrassment Livio referred to is sometimes known as the vacuum catastrophe. Truly empty space, sucked dry of any air or particles, still has an inherent energy to it, according to observations, Livio said. But when scientists use theories of quantum mechanics to try and calculate this vacuum energy, their results differ from the measured results by about 120 orders of magnitude, or the number 1 followed by 120 zeros. [7 Surprising Things About the Universe]
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