I'm watching The Universe: Parallel Universes on the History Channel right now and while I usually enjoy watching The Universe series, this one is annoying me. It's interesting and everything but there's really nothing solid in it. They've got these university professors and researchers on here talking about the various theories and basically they're saying, 'well this is possible, and this is possible, but we think this might be possible also... what's that camera guy? yeah i suppose that's possible too...'

It just seems kind of pointless.

Who are the professors? Hopefully somebody like Gross/Witten/Polchinski and not just people like Susskind/Kaku/Tegmark. I am recording it, FWIW people were worried in my department about this

its like programmes on "Is xxxx real" they just burn an hour

I literally LOLed at the Susskind/Kaku/Tegmark bashing!!! Mostly Susskind, he did a show crapping all over Hawking recently. I know they have had issues for a long long time, but you just can't knock the poor guys chair over after all the attention he has brought to physics. I kinda like Kaku, he really did a lot for strings when it wasn't the thing the cool kids were doing.
Witten makes me think like a comic book villain a little. It makes me feel like some kind of lower caste animal knowing that I am pretty bright...and if I had studied to the maximum of my potential and dedicated my whole life over the last 20years to math and physics that just now I could be qualified to be his dog. I am kidding, of course, but he is disturbingly bright!! I think Greene explains the best to Joe six pack though.

Alexei Vladimir Filippenko, Michio Kaku, and Neil deGrasse Tyson are the main 3 commentators.

Where do you work?

I have not seen it, but I saw some blogs on it. It seems physicists, including participants in the show, were not impressed by it.

A couple of blogs on this

written before the airing

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=1208

and written after the airing

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=1237

and other blogs link from there.

I'm surprised that real scientists are actually paying attention to the show. This is like.. 5th grade science brought to the masses in a "cute" way.

quit being so vague... tell us why they are worried

So i had very low expectations going in.... everybody that had seen it that I had talked to didn't like it at all. But man...... it was really bad. the visuals were nonsensical....i hadn't even heard of some of the things that were talked about...... From Clifford Johnson's blog, it looks like none of the scientists in it had a chance to look at the script or make suggestions, which was obvious to me after viewing

in the most basic layman's terms, what is the basic premise of a parrallel universe?

if one exists, does that open the possibility for an infinite number of concurrent parrallel universes?

The possibility exists by default. But I'm not convinced we have any reason to give a ****.

I think OP hit it. "So, it's possible that a giant pineapple hunts the universe for fruit loops? Wow, science is amazing..."

Wait, we have no more reason to believe there may be parallel universes then we do there may be a giant pineapple hunting the universe for fruit loops?

Strictly speaking? I think that may be accurate. I'll let someone else weigh in.

There is more reason.

The former is postulating that things exist, beyond what we can currently detect, that are somewhat similar to what we can directly observe.

The latter is postulating that things exist, beyond what we can currently detect, that are completely differrent to what we can directly observe.

You've never observed a pineapple?