When God Was Effervescent

Instead of the Big Bang producing a single uniform universe, the latest thinking is that it produced many different universes that appear locally uniform. One question that then arises is how many universes are there. That may sound like the sort of quantity that is inherently unknowable but Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin at Stanford University in California have worked out an answer, of sorts.

Their answer goes like this.

• Shop by category;
• Condition Other Than Normal: Finding Peace In a World Gone Mad?
• Doctoring Freedom: The Politics of African American Medical Care in Slavery and Emancipation (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture)!

The Big Bang was essentially a quantum process which generated quantum fluctuations in the state of the early universe. The universe then underwent a period of rapid growth called inflation during which these perturbations were "frozen", creating different initial classical conditions in different parts of the cosmos. Since each of these regions would have a different set of laws of low energy physics, they can be thought of as different universes. What Linde and Vanchurin have done is estimate how many different universes could have appeared as a result of this effect.

Navigation menu

Their answer is that this number must be proportional to the effect that caused the perturbations in the first place, a process called slow roll inflation, and in particular to the number "e-foldings" of slow roll inflation. Of course, the actual number depends critically on how you define the difference between universes. A "humungous" number is how they describe it, with no little understatement.

Pretty profound, I'd say.

سوق | تسوق When God Was Effervescent by Saleemah L. Graham - Paperback | الكويت

Phillips, in his classic, Your God is Too Small , suggested that we need to broaden and deepen how we imagine God. That was true when we thought there was "just" the universe with its billions of galaxies and billions and billions of stars, with its vast distances and immense age. How much more so, if we live in a multiverse? Somewhere in the Confessions , Augustine suggests the world is like a sponge floating in the middle of the Sea that is God.

As I recall, he dismisses this as idle speculation. Presumably, God is bigger and older than all universes in the multiverse. Perhaps one way to try to understand this is to imagine God as something like an eternal effervescent Sea of Champagne in which bubbles of universes are constantly being created and eventually bursting or coming to whatever end universes come to. It might be too clever by half and even border on being cute, but an "effervescent" God captures something of the celebration and delight we believe to be at the heart of it all while allowing for the possiblity of a multiverse.

Whence the title?

But, that might be just as idle, and idolatrous even, as imagining the world as a sponge in the middle of the sea. Maybe it's better to just be boggled, praise the Lord God of the multiverse, and leave it at that, and avoid being one who "darkens counsel by words without knowledge". Posted by Matt Gunter at Newer Post Older Post Home. The Man of Sapphire Blue. Her ears pained from the things she has heard. Her heart aches from the hurt she has known and her mind burns with confusion.

Sheenah felt alone and nobody would like to listen to her.

Collective effervescence

An illusion of hope is all she is pleading. She is angry, desperate and helpless. But what else needs to happen for change to come for Sheenah's life? Will there still be hope for a better tomorrow? This captivating book is a perfect read that will remind readers that circumstances in one's life doesn't always dictate its outcome. For more information on this book, interested parties may log on to http: Graham, MA is a New Jersey native who has over 13 years of experience in social services.