💫 Are There More Than Three Dimensions in the Universe? Astrophysicist Janna Levin on Lex Fridman's podcast
Janna Levin is an astrophysicist and author of several bestsellers who has spent many years studying the topology of the universe and the mysteries of space. In Lex Fridman's podcast, she talked about the possibility of traveling between different universes and what we could expect from extraterrestrial life forms.
Key Points:
💫 We know that there are three spatial dimensions. But it is possible that in the Big Bang, the universe was born with lots of these dimensions. Perhaps there are rightly rolled up extra spatial dimensions, like a little origami. But we live on a three-dimensional membrane, we are stuck to it and unaware of these other dimensions.
"It is certainly mathematically possible on paper to imagine a higher dimensional universe with more than one membrane. So maybe we really are just one example in an infinite sea of possible universes with slightly different laws of physics. Nature's an experimenter," explains Levin.
💫 Wormholes are a perfectly valid construction to consider. They're just a curve in space-time. They may resemble origami or "holes in Swiss cheese" through which you could travel in a straight line through the universe. It's not simply an engineering problem yet but within the realm of plausible physics.
💫 Over the past 30 years, there have been breakthroughs in astronomy. We have learned that there are more planets in our galaxy than stars. It becomes impossible to imagine that life was not sparked somewhere else, in our Milky Way galaxy, and maybe even in our local neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy, maybe within a few hundred light years of our solar system.
💫 We must be way more imaginative when looking for other life forms. Aliens may be radically different from us. They might be solitary, not move in groups, not want to leave records, not have a localized brain, or have a completely different kind of nervous system.
📱 You can watch the full interview here.
More on the topic:
💫 Astrophysicist Adam Frank and Lex Fridman
