All posts tagged: multiverse

Could the multiverse really exist?

Could the multiverse really exist?

Published by skeptic

abstract: Something that exists as an idea or thought but not concrete or tangible (touchable) in the real world. Beauty, love and memory are abstractions; cars, trees and water are concrete and tangible. Big Bang: The rapid expansion of dense matter and space-time that, according to current theory, marked the origin of the universe. It is supported by astronomers’ current understanding of the composition and structure of the universe. cosmic: An adjective that refers to the cosmos — the universe and everything within it. cosmology: The science of the origin and development of the cosmos, or universe. People who work in this field are known as cosmologists. doppelgänger: A German term for someone that has a spiritual double, or counterpart. It’s not a ghost, because these exist for living individuals. The English language has borrowed the term to refer to someone’s “double” — a person who visually resembles them so well that they easily could be mistaken for them. electron: A negatively charged particle, usually found orbiting the outer regions of an atom; also, the …

For Better or Verse: 5 Fun Multiverse Novels

For Better or Verse: 5 Fun Multiverse Novels

Published by José Betancourt

This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Hello, fellow Earthlings! Let’s talk about the multiverse, which is the idea that there are other universes existing next to our own as we speak. It’s a really fun way to imagine the question “What if?” while providing multiple answers. A lot of science fiction has played with this idea, including This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, V. E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic series, Dark Matter by Blake Crouch, The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow, and most recently, The Subtle Art of Folding Space by John Chu. Below you will find five more exciting novels about people getting to change up their location. And no matter what method is employed in order to travel to a different universe, these are all fun and thought-provoking reads about escaping our planet, something that might appeal to many readers these days. Meet Me at the Crossroads by Megan Giddings …

Create Your Unicorn Career, Explore the Multiverse

Create Your Unicorn Career, Explore the Multiverse

Published by Jenni Sidey

Part 2 of a Two-Part Series Welcome, Alaina Levine. Alaina writes for Science magazine Careers, where she also contributes to her Your Unicorn Career column. And she’s literally written the book on Creating Your Unicorn Career. This book and approach can open up our field of view, like a microscope or a telescope, zooming out to more fully grasp our capacities and potentials in collaborating with the world beyond. Like the Deep Field view of space, when we zoom out, we see so much more than we could before. This helps leverage a growth-mindset into a way of living that can help cut through systemic blocks and enhance mental health as we continually refine our own authentic work and life. Full disclosure: I’ve worked with Alaina and consider her a colleague. When I saw she was releasing Create Your Unicorn Career, I wanted to bring her powerful process to you, especially given the current state of the job market and beyond. Welcome back, Alaina. Rachel Clark: Do you have thoughts about the psychology of this …

Multiverse Computing pushes its compressed AI models into the mainstream

Multiverse Computing pushes its compressed AI models into the mainstream

Published by skeptic

With private company defaults running at upwards of 9.2% — the highest rate in years — VC firm Lux Capital recently advised companies relying on AI to get their compute capacity commitments confirmed in writing. With financial instability rippling through the AI supply chain, Lux warned, a handshake agreement isn’t enough. But there’s another option entirely, which is to stop relying on external compute infrastructure altogether. Smaller AI models that run directly on a user’s own device — no data center, no cloud provider, no counterparty risk — are getting good enough to be worth considering. And Multiverse Computing is raising its hand. The Spanish startup has so far kept a lower profile than some of its peers, but as demand for AI efficiency grows, this is changing. After compressing models from major AI labs including OpenAI, Meta, DeepSeek and Mistral AI, it has launched both an app that showcases the capabilities of its compressed models and an API portal — a gateway that lets developers access and build with those models — that makes …

Forget the multiverse. In the pluriverse, we create reality together

Forget the multiverse. In the pluriverse, we create reality together

Published by skeptic

J R Eyerman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock What is now? The nature of the ever-changing present moment has always fascinated me, because there is a paradox at its heart. From a personal perspective, the present is everything: it is the only time we can ever act or choose; the only thing we can ever experience or know. What did you have for breakfast? Where do you hope to go tomorrow? Even our memories and plans are forged in the present; we can only experience them now. And yet, the conventional view of physics is that now, as we usually think of it, doesn’t actually exist at all. In Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, all time points are equal: any event can be already done or yet to occur, from different points of view. There is no cosmic unfolding through which reality comes to be. This raises a problem for us as thinking, feeling humans. If now is an illusion, then we cannot intervene in that moment to affect the future, because all events and times already …

Spanish ‘soonicorn’ Multiverse Computing releases free compressed AI model

Spanish ‘soonicorn’ Multiverse Computing releases free compressed AI model

Published by skeptic

Large language models have a problem: they are large. Multiverse Computing, a Spanish startup, is addressing this issue with compressed models that aim to close the gap between what frontier models can do and what companies can actually afford to deploy.  The secret sauce is CompactifAI, a compression technology inspired by quantum computing that the Basque company has applied to models released by OpenAI. As of today, developers can access a newer version of Multiverse’s HyperNova 60B model for free on Hugging Face. The company also plans to open-source more compressed models in 2026 to support a wider range of use cases. According to Multiverse, its models are smaller, but nearly as potent and accurate. At 32GB, HyperNova 60B is roughly half the size of the model it derives from — OpenAI’s gpt-oss-120B — while boasting lower memory usage and lower latency. The updated version, called HyperNova 60B 2602, now also better supports ​​tool calling and agentic coding, where inference costs can be high. One of the competitors Multiverse claims to have beaten with HyperNova …

A controversial experiment threatened to kill the multiverse in 2025

A controversial experiment threatened to kill the multiverse in 2025

Published by skeptic

The multiverse was proposed as a way to make sense of bizarre quantum behaviour VICTOR de SCHWANBERG/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY A physics experiment published this year that claimed to measure a single photon in two places at once – and, in the process, discredit the idea of a multiverse – drew pushback from many sceptical physicists, but the scientists behind the demonstration stand by their claim. In May, Holger Hofmann at Hiroshima University in Japan and his colleagues reported the results of a modified version of the famous double-slit experiment that showed individual photons being “delocalised”, or impossible to tie down in one place. The original experiment, first performed in 1801, demonstrated that when light is shone through two thin slits onto a screen, it will produce a wave-like interference pattern. This pattern even remains when the photons are sent through one at a time, which many physicists take as evidence that even single photons behave like waves. But there was, and still is, much debate about what is really happening to the single photon and …

Are we living in a simulation? This experiment could tell us

Are we living in a simulation? This experiment could tell us

Published by skeptic

Deimagine/Getty Images/Ryan Wills Thomas Anderson – otherwise known as Neo – is walking up a flight of stairs when he sees a black cat shake itself and walk past a doorway. Then the moment seems to replay before his eyes. Just a touch of déjà vu, he thinks. But no, his companions insist: he is living inside a computer program and he has just witnessed a glitch. This is a scene from The Matrix, a film released in 1999, but we have been entranced and disturbed by the possibility that we could be living inside a simulated reality for centuries. The idea cuts so deep partly because it is so hard to refute: if we are immersed in a fake world, how could we know? Some physicists take this notion seriously. “The entire universe may operate like a giant computer,” says Melvin Vopson at the University of Portsmouth, UK, who has long been interested in the simulation hypothesis. He believes there are already important clues suggesting it is correct – and he has even proposed …