How a talk with pictures and ideas can open up the Megaverse
Janna Levin at RIT’s Caroline Werner Gannett Project lecture
on September 11, 2007

Rachael Baldanza

Janna Levin spoke eloquently, passionately, and animatedly about the universe on a weeknight in an auditorium here in upstate New York. Is the universe infinite? We won’t be trying to answer that question tonight, she told us, instead we will frame the questions, the big theories, and the ways in which theoretical physics attempts to solve these and other mysteries (What if there are many dimensions? Is the universe infinitely old? Is there an infinite number of galaxies?).
Luckily, her language was always clear, her talk was completely illustrated, and her metaphors were rich. She challenged the idea that we can see the universe as a backdrop, a stage set, or a screen. “The universe is space and time itself. Not a stage, but an integral part of our lives. We live on a second generation star in an ordinary solar system around an ordinary planet.”
“ We live in space time.” Space is what can be measured with rulers, time is what you can measure with clocks. We locate ourselves by a physical location (North/South, East/West and height as in the 4th floor of a building) and at a certain time (at 7:05pm). As it was September 11th, when Levin used a location in New York City to orient herself, the people sitting near me nodded solemnly. Memory has a location too.
Levin used a digital image of a small cartoonish green turtle to illustrate the idea that the Earth is finite and edgeless. This little green turtle could walk around the world and come back to where he started. But what if the universe is infinite? Our little green turtle might walk and never come back. There would be no sense of an edge even.
Did the universe have an origin? Einstein believed the universe was permanent.
The remnant echo of the origin of the universe was found in New Jersey.
By the time Levin was telling us about the potential for a megaverse, we were all enthralled. Instead of a standard diagram or theoretical model, Levin used a drawing to illustrate the idea that a universe could be a part of a larger megaverse, wart like forms bubbling off and around an amorphous shape.
A student in the middle of the audience asked, “how does someone start in theoretical physics? How did you start?” She had dropped out of high school, started her study in philosophy at Barnard but noticed that philosophers couldn’t be wrong. The only times she saw her philosophy colleagues get ‘trumped’ was when someone brought in science, an arena in which ideas could be changed.