Linde:In the future, our sky will look much different - as the stars in our neighborhood begin to die.

Wired:Can we travel to the other bubbles of our fractal universe? A peak that rises on top of a peak is like a bubble that newly swells out from the side of a pre-existing bubble. The peaks in one image correspond to the bubbles in the other. What is a little hard to grasp is that the two images represent the same thing. I can't show the inflation in my picture, but I can represent it by putting new, secondary peaks on top of the first peaks, third-level peaks on top of those peaks, and so on. The peaks are the places where inflation takes place at these places, the universe will rapidly expand. Then I add a randomly fluctuating scalar field, an inflaton field, and I represent the regions where the inflaton field has a low numerical value by valleys, and the regions where the scalar field is large by peaks. Our space is three-dimensional of course, but I represent it in this picture as a two-dimensional rubber sheet. In the other picture - and I've done several computer simulations of this image - I think of space as a flat sheet. It looks a little like the linked flotation bladders on seaweed. In one, I draw something that looks like lots of separate bubbles connected to each other where they touch. Linde:There are two kinds of pictures I like to use. If there is a place where the fluctuations make the inflaton field sufficiently large, then at this spot the universe begins expanding very rapidly, which creates so much space that we can safely live there. Quantum mechanics implies that the scalar fields undergo unpredictable fluctuations as a result of the uncertainty principle. When there is a large air pressure, you get wind when there is a large electrical charge, you get sparks and when there is a large scalar field called the inflaton field, you get an expansion of space. You don't notice a constant scalar field any more than you notice a constant air pressure or a constant electric charge. These fields fill the universe and show their presence by affecting the properties of elementary particles. Two scalar fields that are important for inflationary theories are sometimes called the inflaton field and the Higgs field. His responses to the questions of mathematician Rudy Rucker have been smoothed by Rucker's interpolation and editing. An attractive, tidily dressed man, Linde speaks with a thick Russian accent and a colorfully inverted syntax.

He uses computer simulations for much of his research, and he has recently suggested that our universe may be the result of a physicist-hacker's experiment. In 1982, he began formulating a new theory of the universe - an improvement on the big-bang model. He lives there with his wife, Renata Kallosh (also a Stanford physics professor, specializing in superstrings and supergravity), and his two sons, Dmitri and Alex. Physicist Andrei Linde wants to know: Since we live in this weird universe - fractal, self-replicating, inflationary - does that imply that it was created not by God, but by some physicist-hacker?ДЄndrei Linde, a 47-year-old physicist from Moscow, started teaching at Stanford University in 1990.

Andrei linde