Janet Fischer, The Economist
When I first heard the idea for the project, it seemed like a far-fetched, outlier example. Yet it turned out to be a very easy one to model: You can imagine the emergence of the universe by multiplying billions of photons on a star. Because photons and matter have such different energies, the rate at which they do this is not just different; they are completely opposite. As the cosmos expands, the probability of observing the emergence of a photon of a kind that came out of the universe from space in a given time depends directly on the rate that galaxies expand.
“Imagine an infinitely large number of such binary pairs,” says Paul Steinhardt, a theoretical physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado. “When one happens to be associated with a new universe, you’ve got something that’s not going to happen any other way.”
Scientists have done simulations of such an event over the past decades, but to our knowledge there is no model that includes two identical twins. When an identical twin passes away and is replaced by a random number, the replacement is random as well, because the chance that two identical twins would pass away together is exactly the same as the chance that two random numbers would come from the same pair of twins.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
So the idea, that the universe might have a twin with us, is not just a few researchers in a dusty laboratory. It has inspired dozens and dozens of companies and universities, each building what has been dubbed the Singularity Hub — a site where researchers collaborate on projects related to singularity theory. It already boasts of such high-profile projects as a “wetsuit” designed to simulate the physical evolution of life on earth and the first laser-based space telescope, both of which were funded in part or entirely by Google.
Most importantly, the Singularity Hub connects researchers from many disciplines, including mathematics, physics, computer science and engineering, and provides a forum that is open to anyone who wants to share their work. “Most of the time, people have a particular field and they start their academic careers in one field,” says Dario Sarni, director of the Center for the Study of Humanity and AI at Columbia University. “But it’s very different if you have the support, if you’ve got a hub for all types of people, and if you share your ideas with