11 February 2008

Welcome to the multiverse!

This imagining of the multiverse as snowflake in 196,833 dimensional spaces comes from the excellent Planetary by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday, which was first published as a regular comic in 1999 but my version is the large hardback collection Absolute Planetary.

This gets a worthy mention in my blog now as it was referred to surprisingly (to me!) in one of my regular podcasts this week.

Most of my podcasts are about business, current affairs or science and the most sciency of the science podcasts is Material World from the BBC. Because it is the one that is the most technical it is also the one that I enjoy the most.

One of the topics this week was symmetry, based on the book Finding Moonshine by Marcus du Sautoy (hardly my favourite mathematician but it is good to see mathematics getting some coverage in the media), and this looked at symmetry in various dimension.

In 2 dimensions (flat surfaces) this is rather easy and it's not much harder in three (our world as we see it) but in larger dimensions things get a lot more complex.

The topic was opened by the presenter, Quentin Cooper, quoting from Planetary, i.e. the page above, and then explaining that this is a genuine multiverse theory, thereby combining my loves for science and comics in one act. Superb!

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