Discover
magazine: Cosmologists are not your run-of-the-mill
thinkers, and Max Tegmark is not your run-of-the-mill
cosmologist. Throughout his career, Tegmark has made important
contributions to problems such as measuring darkmatter in the
cosmos and understanding how light from the early universe
informs models of the Big Bang. But unlike most other
physicists, who stay within the confines of the latest theories
and measurements, the Swedish-born Tegmark has a night job. In
a series ofpapers that have caught the attention of physicists
and philosophers around the world, he explores not what the
laws of nature say but why there are any laws at all.According
to Tegmark, "there is only mathematics; that is all that
exists." In his theory, the mathematical universe hypothesis,
he updates quantum physics and cosmology with the concept of
many parallel universes inhabiting multiple levels of space and
time. Byposing his hypothesis at the crossroads of philosophy
and physics, Tegmark is harking back to the ancient Greeks with
the oldest of the old questions: What is real?
