13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

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Hurley (Jorge Garcia), Jacob (Mark Pellegrino), Kate (Evangeline Lilly), Jack (Matthew Fox), and Sawyer (Josh Holloway) on Lost's alternate universe.

So it’s over.  No more smoke monsters.  No more “Others”. No more Man-in-Black. No more Lost.

Unless you gave up reading newspapers, watching TV or viewing any other kind of media, you know last night was the final episode of Lost.  I was a big fan of the first year of the show.  Then, like many others, I lost interest as characters and plot lines multiplied like rabbits.  I did tune in for last nights finale though.

I still don’t know exactly what the island is (and why it has a bathroom plug that should never, ever, ever be removed).  The writers did, however, finally explain the “sideways universe” where all the characters we knew from the island seemed to be living alternative lives. It was (yawn, spoiler alert!, yawn) bardo – the intermediate state between death and whatever comes next.  I’m not wild about this ending (the wonderful Jacob’s Ladder did it better) and was hoping something more cosmological.

To that end this is a good chance to briefly review a few scientific ideas about alternate realities.  “Multiverses” – which are universes of universes – have become quite popular in physics over the last few decades being called upon to explain everything from quantum physics to why our universe seems so well-tuned for life.  But different scientists mean different things when they talk about a Multiverse.  So here is a quick primer. (The idea of the different levels of alternate universes comes from physicist Max Tegmark and you can follow that link to a story I did about his ideas in DISCOVER).

After The Jump: We Dig Deep

via npr.org

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