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I’ve got a new article out in Seed<\/em><\/a> about how religious physicists, in particular, are thinking their way around the theological problems posed by multiverse theory. It’s good, mind-bending stuff.<\/p>\n Scientists now recognize that if space were expanding at a slightly different speed, or if the strong nuclear force were just a little off, our universe would be a hydrogen mush incapable of supporting life. The chances that the cosmic conditions needed for even a single living cell would come about in a random toss-up are astonishingly low, often called the \u201cfine tuning problem.\u201d \u201cThe most obvious explanation for fine-tuning is that fine-tuning is real,\u201d argues O\u2019Leary, \u201cthat we live in a designed universe.\u201d If, however, we live in a vast and varying multiverse, there could be as many as 10500<\/sup> different universes in all, making the chance of ours occurring among them comfortably higher.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Unfortunately, a lot of great material from my research didn’t make it into the article. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe<\/em>, in Midtown. “There are features of the world that may not be explainable in the conventional sense,” he said, suggestively. “A multiverse is a very different framework to do science in.” We also spoke about the Large Hadron Collider being developed in Europe, which has raised some far-off fears about creating a black hole that will envelop the Earth. Greene told me:<\/p>\n From the public relations standpoint, having the whole black-hole-destroy-the-world thing was very good. I must have done six or eight programs on the LHC, and ultimately that question was, why I was there and why anyone else was there. Is it possible? If you ask me, is it possible that the moon will turn into a big ball of Swiss cheese, I guess it’s possible. It’s so incredibly unlikely that it’s not worth thinking about it or speaking about it, and that’s the kind of possibility we’re talking about.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Though the final version of the article is all about Christianity, I also asked what other traditions might think about multiverses. This brought me to Donald Lopez, a Buddhist studies professor at the University of Michigan, author of Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed. <\/em>“Buddhists are definitely proponents of multiverses,” he says. According to thousand-year-old sutras from the Mahayana school, Buddhas appear not only in our universe but in others, which lie very far away\u2014not unlike an inflationary multiverse.<\/p>\n