Welcome
I’m pleased to announce that my new book, A Big Bang in a Little Room, goes on sale today. It discusses how it may one day be possible for humans to make their own “baby universe” in the lab — a DIY cosmos complete with (possibly) its own stars, planets and people.
This site is a place to discuss some of the questions raised in the book. How could physicists go about performing this feat of “cosmogenesis”, and should they? What does their quest tell us about the origins of our universe?
In researching this “little bang theory,” I spoke with a number of eminent scientists and philosophers, including Tony Zee, Stephen Hsu, Antoine Suarez, Abhay Ashtekar, Alan Guth, Andrei Linde, Alex Vilenkin, Eduardo Guendelman, Joe Polchinski, Nobuyki Sakai, Claudio Castelnovo, Albert De Roeck, Don Page, Greg Landsberg, Seth Lloyd, and Anders Sandberg. Along the way to understanding how we might one day create our own cosmos in the lab, we also discussed the existence of parallel universes and alternative selves, ethics in the multiverse, the origins of space and time, if computers have free will, whether we can find evidence that our universe was knocked up in the garage of an alien “physicist hacker,” or by God, or if we are all part of a Matrix-style computer simulation.
I’ll be adding more about these ideas in the coming weeks. But in the meantime, you can order a copy of the book now.