Technoccult

A staple of mind-bending science fiction, the possibility of multiple universes has long intrigued hard-nosed physicists, mathematicians and cosmologists too. We may not be able — as least not yet — to prove they exist, many serious scientists say, but there are plenty of reasons to think that parallel dimensions are more than figments of eggheaded imagination. The specter of shadow worlds has been thrown into relief by the December release of “The Golden Compass,” a Hollywood blockbuster adapted from the first volume of Philip Pullman’s classic sci-fi trilogy, “His Dark Materials”.

In the film, an orphaned girl living in an alternate universe goes on a quest, accompanied by an animal manifestation of her soul, to rescue kidnapped children and discover the secret of a contaminating dust said to be leaking from a parallel realm. Talking bears and magic dust aside, the basic premise of Pullman’s fantasy is not beyond the scientific pale. “The idea of multiple universes is more than a fantastic invention — it appears naturally within several scientific theories, and deserves to be taken seriously,” said Aurelien Barrau, a French particle physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), hardly a hotbed of flaky science. “The multiverse is no longer a model, it is a consequence of our models,” explained Barrau, who recently published an essay for CERN defending the concept.”

(via Physorg)

“Consider someone who has just died of a heart attack. His organs are intact, he hasn’t lost blood. All that’s happened is his heart has stopped beating-the definition of “clinical death”-and his brain has shut down to conserve oxygen. But what has actually died?

As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Nuland wrote the best seller “How We Die,” the conventional answer was that it was his cells that had died. The patient couldn’t be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn’t receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can’t be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “After one hour,” he says, “we couldn’t see evidence the cells had died. We thought we’d done something wrong.” In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.”

(via Newsweek)