9. Island Universes

2019 ◽  
pp. 150-165
Keyword(s):  
Island Universes

Kant and extragalactic revolution in astronomy

2004 ◽  
Vol 47 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 95-109
Author(s):  
Milan Cirkovic
Keyword(s):  
History Of Astronomy ◽  
Physical Universe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Island Universes

In this paper we briefly consider the role Kant's early philosophy, and notably his "island universes" hypothesis played in the history of astronomy. There are many reasons for this, including the coincidence of Kant's jubilee year with 80 years since Hubble's discovery (1924) of the extragalactic universe. This discovery, confirming the "island universes" hypothesis revolutionized our picture of the physical universe. Prehistory of this revolution has another aspect, apart from the historical one, of significance for philosophy: it presents one of the best supported and empirically documented instances of the application of the Duhem-Quine thesis on subdetermination of theory by experiments.

Awe

2019 ◽  
pp. 120-152
Author(s):  
John Marsh
Keyword(s):  
Big Bang ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
James Agee ◽  
Grapes Of Wrath ◽  
Empire State Building ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Long Jump ◽  
The Big Bang ◽  
Island Universes ◽  
The Universe

By awe, philosophers and psychologists mean the sensation that overcomes someone in the presence of something simultaneously vast, powerful, and, when compared to humans, strangely humbling. The chapter begins with a review of amazing discoveries such as island universes, the expanding universe, and the Big Bang that altered the understanding of the universe and made the solar system “seem but a speck of dust in infinite space.” It then turns to other sources of awe, or the Depression sublime: the Empire State Building; Jesse Owens’s record-setting long jump at the 1936 Berlin Olympics; the moral heroism of the Joads in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath; and James Agee and Walker Evans’s deification of tenant farmers in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Whereas most accounts of the sublime involve the vastness of nature overwhelming human beings, during the Depression human beings themselves became a source of the sublime.

scholarly journals ANTI-DE SITTER ISLAND-UNIVERSES FROM 5D STANDING WAVES

2010 ◽  
Vol 25 (25) ◽  
pp. 2131-2143 ◽  
Author(s):  
MERAB GOGBERASHVILI ◽  
DOUGLAS SINGLETON
Keyword(s):  
Infinite Number ◽  
Standing Waves ◽  
Warp Factor ◽  
De Sitter Spacetime ◽  
De Sitter ◽  
Landscape Models ◽  
Sitter Spacetime ◽  
Gravitational And Cosmological Constants ◽  
Island Universes ◽  
Cosmological Constants

We construct simple standing wave solutions in a 5D spacetime with a ghost-like scalar field. The nodes of these standing waves are "islands" of 4D anti-de Sitter spacetime. In the case of increasing (decreasing) warp factor, there are a finite (infinite) number of nodes and thus a finite (infinite) number of anti-de Sitter island-universes having different gravitational and cosmological constants. This is similar to the landscape models, which postulate a large number of universes with different parameters.

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