I should quite...

You're listening to Radio Lab.

The podcast.

From...

New York Public Radio.

Public Radio.

W-N-Y-C.

And NPR.

Hey, I'm Chad Abumrad.

And I'm Robert Crilwich.

This is Radio Lab.

The podcast.

Yes.

Ooh, that was exciting.

And this particular turn of our wheel, we are going to be taking up a very odd, odd idea.

Which is?

Is it possible for a human, a man or a woman, probably a mature man or woman, we'd hope, to build their own universe?

Do you mean like a theory?

No, actually, this I'm going to, this is a serious proposition.

There are people who are now thinking about it seriously at Stanford in Israel, in Japan,

theoretical physicists who are trying to figure out how one might go about this. Go about building a universe? Create a whole universe. As in like a carpenter, like in a carpentorial sort of way? Like here build a table? In a carpentorial sort of way. No, you know why that's not possible? Why? Because the universe is that which we are a part of. So how can you build something that is that we are already a part of?

To begin. To begin this conversation, we do have to consider this word universe, which to most of us, as you just said, means everything that is. Everything. And therefore, by definition, there should only be one of them. Yes, of course. But for physicists like Brian Green, our friend Brian Green, who came to my kitchen so we could have this discussion, to physicists like him, he's very comfortable with the idea of more than one universe.

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