(Enter Frank Tipler, stage right, declaiming "Thomas Aquinas is
simply misunderstood!")
Er, isn't this a bit of an over-simplification? I am not an astrophysicist,
however I vaguely recall reading a fair bit lately about head-scratching
over the initial era of expansion, and some suggestions (does the name
Linde mean anything?) that it was driven by a one-off particle which
subsequently disappeared behind an event horizon, creating yet another
universe, to repeat the process all over again ad infinitum -- indeed,
that our universe is just one of an infinite fractal foam of universes,
all budding off one another whenever and wherever a singularity is
formed. There's also been some muttering along the lines that this
implies that universes that spawn lots of black holes are evolutionarily
fit and will give rise to lots of children, and that our particular
set-up (which permits massive stars, atomic nucleosynthesis, and
supernovae) is particularly well-tuned for this.
Or have I grasped the wrong end of the stick ...?
-- Charlie
"For me, the best thing about cyberpunk is that it taught me how to
enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just imagine the
whole thing is two miles below the moon's surface, and that half the
people's right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And
suddenly it's interesting again."
-- Rudy Rucker