Mysteries of the universe

August 26, 2003 | Source: Slate

One morning last April, the New York Times op-ed page ran a piece by the Australian physicist Paul Davies warning readers not to be so gullible as to believe there could be more than one universe.

The next month, Scientific American published a long article by the physicist Max Tegmark asserting that, to the contrary, parallel universes almost certainly do exist. Around the same time, bookstores received Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?, wherein Martin Gardner dismisses theories of multiple universes as “frivolous fantasies.”

If you had seen all this, you may well have asked yourself: Is this really a matter on which I need to form an opinion?