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Galaxies (photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope): Dark energy fills space and causes it to swell
Photo: NASA / ESA / B. SUNNQUIST / J. MACK
This text is one of the most read articles in 2018
Was there ever a line in chalk that encircled as much as this line that Cumrun Vafa scribbled on the blackboard in his office at Harvard University?
This circle, Vafa lectures as he paints it, should not only encompass all possible universes, but also the impossible.
"Just this," he adds, while scattering a few dots in the circle, "these are the few universes that are mathematically possible."
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String theorist Vafa:
Anchoring in reality Photo: BEN SKLAR / DER SPIEGEL
Vafa wants to find out what makes one world different from the other.
To illustrate this, he resorts to the pictorial parable of an almost infinite swamp from which a few islands protrude.
"This is the swamp in which there are logical contradictions, so no universes are possible," he says, pointing to the area in the circle.
Then he points to the points in it: "There is only solid ground here, on these islands - these are the physically possible universes."
It may sound exaggerated what the man is saying.
In the theoretical physicist community, however, his word carries weight.
He has been famous, at least since he won the $ 3 million Breakthrough Prize in 2017.
His most recent hypothesis in particular attracted the physicist a lot of attention.
He roused the professional world with the suspicion that our universe, as it has been described so far, is not on one of the islands, but in the marshland.
As a result, a heated debate has broken out among physicists about what that could mean, if it were to be true: Is it possible that the world in which we live cannot actually exist?
Or has Vafa proven that the so-called string theory on which all his calculations are based contradicts reality?
"This is how the critics of string theory would like to see it," says the researcher from Harvard University.
"But they also want to misunderstand me."
He only agreed with them on one point: his hypothesis, if it turned out to be correct, had far-reaching implications.
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