Last night’s talks were really interesting and it was good to get three different opinions being discussed in a (semi-)public setting. Usually these sort of lectures are one-sided in their opinions, which tends to hide the fact that the hot topics are also the most controversial. So as I mentioned earlier there were three speakers, Bernard Carr, George Ellis and Paul Davies. On the night Chris Isham was not able to attend, so one of the representatives of the Templeton Foundation acted as chairperson.

Bernard introduced the idea of the multiverse, after having plugged the new book and thanked all the contributors. With only thirty minutes allotted to each speaker there wasn’t enough time for a detailed explanation, but he explained some of the different multiverse ideas, in particular using this picture by Max Tegmark to illustrate the hierarchy of multiverse structures. With time running out (and some quite surprising heckling when he asked for some leeway), Bernard had to race through the history of physics on one slide, imploring us to consider it as “an artistic journey”.