Zenith Grant Awardee
Dr. Andrei Linde
Stanford University
Project Title
Multiverse, Inflation, Life and Probabilities
Project Summary
During the last 25 years a new scientific paradigm gradually emerged. It is based on a combination of successes of inflationary cosmology and string theory, but it also involves many other areas of knowledge. According to this paradigm, we live in a huge multiverse consisting of many exponentially large parts with different laws of physics operating in each of them. Instead of attempting to find a unique explanation of all laws of Nature and all parameters of our world, which was the traditional goal of science, we are trying to find all possible values of these parameters and establish a correlation between them and the fact of our own existence. Many scientists strongly dislike this approach, whereas others are enthusiastic and compare it to the revolution in physics in the beginning of the 20th century. Being one of the authors of the new paradigm, I clearly see many of its unsolved problems, some of which appear when we are trying to go beyond the traditional boundaries of science. I am going to investigate various relations between inflationary multiverse, string theory landscape, and our life. My main goal is to learn how to make scientific predictions in this complicated framework.
Technical Abstract
QSpace Latest
PressRelease: Shining a light on the roots of plant “intelligence”
All living organisms emit a low level of light radiation, but the origin and function of these ‘biophotons’ are not yet fully understood. An international team of physicists, funded by the Foundational Questions Institute, FQxI, has proposed a new approach for investigating this phenomenon based on statistical analyses of this emission. Their aim is to test whether biophotons can play a role in the transport of information within and between living organisms, and whether monitoring biophotons could contribute to the development of medical techniques for the early diagnosis of various diseases. Their analyses of the measurements of the faint glow emitted by lentil seeds support models for the emergence of a kind of plant ‘intelligence,’ in which the biophotonic emission carries information and may thus be used by plants as a means to communicate. The team reported this and reviewed the history of biophotons in an article in the journal Applied Sciences in June 2024.