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Maybe some readers recall Immanuel Velikovsky's 1950 mega bestseller Worlds in Collision. The book, which caused a real sensation at the time, was an attempt to "explain" many of the big cataclysms and "miracles" recorded in mythic and folkloric narratives of ancient cultures as real astrophysical events. Velikovsky's thesis was that narratives of floods and mass destructions were not just allegorical or metaphorical but records of events that did take place. Mythic and biblical catastrophism had a historical and a scientific value to them.

In Velikovsky's theory, Venus was ejected from Jupiter as a kind of comet sometime around the 15th century BCE. Its periodic passage by Earth caused all sorts of havoc. His mythic inspiration came from Greek mythology, in particular the fable where Athena (Venus) was ejected from the head of Zeus (Jupiter). In spite of its popular appeal, the astronomical community summarily dismissed Velikovsky's ideas, a key player having been none other than Carl Sagan, who knew a lot about Venus and its atmosphere. In any case, Velikovsky's celestial catastrophism follows on the footsteps of many claims of apocalyptic endings due to upheavals in the skies. And even if his thesis was unfounded, bad things can and do happen from time to time due to collisions between "worlds." Think, for example, of the demise of the dinosaurs 65 millions years ago due a collision with a seven-mile wide asteroid.

Still, Velikovsky's doomsday imaginings are a child's play compared to some catastrophic ideas that modern cosmologists have been putting forward. I don't mean the devastation caused by a collision with an asteroid or comet, but of whole universes colliding with one another, including with our own.

Welcome to cosmic catastrophism.

The universe began its existence 13.7 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since. However, current observations indicate that this expansion wasn't always at the same rate. Right at the beginning of time, the cosmos underwent a short period of hyper-accelerated expansion called inflation. According to this theory, proposed by MIT cosmologist Alan Guth in 1981, our whole universe could have emerged from a tiny patch of space that was stretched like a rubber band by the enormous factor of one hundred trillion trillion times (1026) in a fraction of a second. The universe we observe today fits within this stretched region, like an island in an ocean.

Now imagine that other portions of space, neighbors to that tiny patch that gave rise to our universe, also got stretched at different rates and at different times. We would have a universe filled with island-universes, each with its own history and possibly even types of matter, etc. This ocean of island-universes is called the multiverse.

Since physics is an empirical science, any hypothesis needs to be tested before being accepted by the community. This is as true for a ball rolling down a hill as for Guth's inflating universe or the multiverse. For the ball, we know how to apply Newton's laws of motion to describe its rolling and the results come out in excellent agreement with observations. Cosmic inflation predicts that our universe is geometrically flat (or almost) like the surface of a table but in three dimensions; it also predicts that space should be filled with radiation with a uniform temperature, as bathwater fills a bathtub. These two predictions have been confirmed, although a skeptic could argue that inflation was designed to accommodate these two observational facts about the universe. To its merit, inflation also offers an explanation as to how galaxies were first born and then grouped together in clusters, something that no other theory can do satisfactorily. Cosmologists like inflation a lot for its simplicity and range of explanation.

Since we can't receive information from outside our universe (or better, from outside our "horizon", the sphere that delimits how far light travelled in 13.7 billion years), how can we possibly test the existence of other universes "out there"? This has been a sticky point with the multiverse and indeed, the notion that the multiverse extends perhaps to spatial infinity is untestable. Infinity makes sense mathematically and may even be realized in Nature; but we will never know for sure.

However, we can do the next best thing, and see if at least neighboring universes exist. Just as with soap bubbles that vibrate when they collide with one another without popping, if another universe collided with ours in the distant past, the radiation inside our universe would have vibrated in response to the perturbations caused by the collision. These perturbations would be registered in the cosmic radiation and could, in principle, be observed. Matthew Kleban from New York University and his collaborators, and Anthony Aguirre from the University of California at Santa Cruz and his have been studying what kinds of signals would be left over from these dramatic events. Kleban found a unique signature, concentric rings where the radiation temperature would show a characteristic fluctuation. On top of the rings the radiation itself would be polarized, that is, it would oscillate in tandem in a specific direction of the sky. At least for now, no telltale rings have been found in the cosmic radiation, although the European satellite Planck promises to deliver more accurate polarization data that may shed light on the issue.

The bad news is that the probability of a collision with another universe increases with time: we could disappear at any instant: live life to the fullest!

The good news is that, although the multiverse as a whole may not be a testable scientific hypothesis, with some luck we may at least know if one or a few other universes exist. An observational test distinguishes science from idle speculation.

I will not spoil the reader's pleasure in watching the relationship between mother and daughter unfold, including a confrontation between 9-year-old Sonia and her mother, who locked herself in a dark room for months after her husband's death. But this is a story of human triumph, not just for the future justice, but for her mother, for her doctor brother and, though it may be a cliche, for the American dream.

It is a story too of Latin life in America, rich with descriptions of food and parties at her grandmother's house, complete with dancing, recitations of poetry and even forbidden seances, calling forth the spirits.

Sotomayor's tale of moving from the poverty of the projects to life at Princeton and Yale is entertaining and informative, reminding us that especially in the pre-Internet era, but probably now too, children whose parents live meager paycheck-to-paycheck lives can be amazingly isolated. Sotomayor didn't know what "the Ivies" were when a friend told her she should apply to them. The nuns at Cardinal Spellman High School suggested she apply to Fordham. But she initially lusted for Harvard after seeing Love Story, and she disdained Fordham, admitting ruefully in the book that she might have been more willing to apply there if she had known that many of the campus scenes in the movie were actually filmed at Fordham. In the end though, Harvard terrified her when she visited the school for an interview. It was so alien that she literally fled.

Later, her naivete leads to some hilarious scenes at Princeton, as when she throws away an invitation to join Phi Beta Kappa, believing it to be a "scam." Only the intervention of an eagle-eyed friend, who saw the letter in the trash, saved the day.

Sotomayor goes to considerable lengths to say she is not "self-made." She candidly describes her struggles and failures, starting with how she learned to study in middle school: She asked the girl who got the most gold stars. But it soon becomes clear that while she needed help from lots of people to succeed, her own devotion to work and discipline have been the mainstays of her life.

At Princeton, she quickly realized she was deficient in English and in writing skills, prompting her to design for herself a crash course in writing and reading the classics. It was not the first time she would fall on her face but pick herself up and work like a demon to improve. In her first legal job, as a summer associate in a big New York firm, she failed miserably. After law school she describes her beginning panics as a "duckling" handling misdemeanors in the Manhattan district attorney's office, and how she transformed herself into a top felony prosecutor. After four years, though, she decided to leave, fearing she was losing her humanity. "I could see the signs that I too was hardening, and I didn't like what I saw. Even my sympathy for the victims, once such an inexhaustible driver of my efforts, was being depleted by the daily spectacle of misdeeds and misery."

She is similarly candid in describing her marriage and divorce.

Sotomayor writes with a sense of humor. Describing her post-divorce life, she observes wryly, "Probably nothing constrained my dating life as much as living at home with my mother. To hear her screaming from the bedroom, 'Sonia, it's midnight. You have to work tomorrow!' did not exactly make me feel like Mary Tyler Moore. "

For the reader, one of the most fascinating aspects of the Sotomayor personality turns out to be the way she confronts her fears and failures. She doesn't do well in a course, so she enrolls in a harder one on the same subject. She is afraid of swimming, so she takes swimming lessons and becomes a regular in the pool. She is a clumsy klutz, so she decides to soothe the heartache of a failed romance by taking Salsa lessons and learns to dance. Even her looks and clothes — something she always claimed to have no interest in because she couldn't compete with her stylish mother — she eventually learns to deal with. She takes shopping lessons from a friend and gets her own style.

In the forward to her book, Sotomayor writes: "I have ventured to write more intimately about my personal life than is customary for a member of the Supreme Court, and with that candor comes a measure of vulnerability. I will be judged as a human being by what readers find here. There are hazards to openness, but they seem minor compared with the possibility that some readers may find comfort, perhaps even inspiration, from a close examination of how an ordinary person, with strengths and weaknesses like anyone else, has managed an extraordinary journey."

It is an apt observation, except that after reading the book, few will think she is ordinary.

Democrats are fond of saying that Republicans are interested in only one thing, and that is to thwart President Obama at every opportunity. He proposes something, the GOP opposes it. He says it's day, they say it's night. In some cases, those complaints are justified; in others, it's just whining.

But it's a complex story about the opposition to Obama's choice of Chuck Hagel, the former two-term Republican senator from Nebraska, to become the next secretary of defense. It may not be about Obama at all.

Back home, during his 12 years in the Senate, Hagel was enormously popular. In 2002, he was re-elected with 83 percent of the vote, the largest landslide in Nebraska Senate history. But his relationship with Republicans in Washington is and has always been more complicated.

Hagel, who left the Senate after 2008, would if confirmed become the first Vietnam veteran to head up the department. While Obama has pointed to Hagel's tour of duty in Southeast Asia — where he won two Purple Hearts — as positives, his opponents are focusing on a different part of the world.

A sizable amount of the criticism is over the issue of Israel. Hagel has been famously quoted for having said in 2006, "The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here," and "I'm not an Israeli senator. I'm a United States senator." He also said, "I support Israel, but my first interest is I take an oath of office to the Constitution of the United States — not to a president, not to a party, not to Israel. If I go run for Senate in Israel, I'll do that."

In addition, he broke with his party regarding the efficacy of sanctions against Iran and has said things about Hamas and Hezbollah that have troubled senators on both sides of the aisle, especially supporters of Israel.

In light of the above, Jewish groups, such as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Council, have been publicly expressing their concerns about the nomination, though neither has announced outright opposition. Other Hagel critics have gone further, saying that his comments make him anti-Semitic, or anti-Israel. Now, while railing against the "Jewish lobby" might not be the most politic way of making a point, questioning Israel's policies does not make one anti-Semitic. And while one might question the logic or reality of trying to engage with Iran, advocating such a policy does not necessarily make one anti-Israel. But the charge has been raised.

Also, although he voted to authorize the war in Iraq, he became a leading GOP critic of President Bush's surge, at one point calling the administration's strategy "pitiful," comments that probably led to his falling out with John McCain, whom he had endorsed for president in 2000. (He also criticized Bush for describing Iran as part of the "axis of evil.") The neocons who backed Bush's conduct of the war are among Hagel's leading opponents today.

Then there's his position on gays. During the 1998 confirmation hearings for James Hormel, President Clinton's choice for ambassador to Luxembourg, Hagel made clear he felt he wasn't qualified, calling him "openly, aggressively gay." Hagel waited until last month, as word spread about his possible nomination, before he apologized for those comments. Several gay and lesbian groups have accepted his apology, though not the Log Cabin Republicans, the gay GOP organization.

While no counts have been taken, Senate hesitation to Hagel's nomination doesn't seem to be large but it is significant, and most of it comes from his fellow Republicans. (South Carolina's Lindsey Graham, for one, called it "incredibly controversial," an "in your face" choice by Obama "to all of us who are supportive of Israel.")

Other conservatives have expressed their unhappiness with the pick. Jennifer Rubin, a right-wing blogger at washingtonpost.com, called the nomination "so outrageous that it becomes an easy 'no' vote for all Republicans." She suggested the GOP take a page out of the Ted Kennedy playbook, in which he ferociously attacked President Reagan's choice of Robert Bork for the Supreme Court:

"If Republicans had nervy firebrands like the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, someone would rise up to declare, 'Chuck Hagel's America is a land in which gays would be forced back in the closet and Jews would be accused of dual loyalty. Chuck Hagel's world is one in which devastating defense cuts become a goal, not a problem; we enter direct talks with the terrorist organization Hamas; and sanctions on Iran wither.'"

Maybe some readers recall Immanuel Velikovsky's 1950 mega bestseller Worlds in Collision. The book, which caused a real sensation at the time, was an attempt to "explain" many of the big cataclysms and "miracles" recorded in mythic and folkloric narratives of ancient cultures as real astrophysical events. Velikovsky's thesis was that narratives of floods and mass destructions were not just allegorical or metaphorical but records of events that did take place. Mythic and biblical catastrophism had a historical and a scientific value to them.

In Velikovsky's theory, Venus was ejected from Jupiter as a kind of comet sometime around the 15th century BCE. Its periodic passage by Earth caused all sorts of havoc. His mythic inspiration came from Greek mythology, in particular the fable where Athena (Venus) was ejected from the head of Zeus (Jupiter). In spite of its popular appeal, the astronomical community summarily dismissed Velikovsky's ideas, a key player having been none other than Carl Sagan, who knew a lot about Venus and its atmosphere. In any case, Velikovsky's celestial catastrophism follows on the footsteps of many claims of apocalyptic endings due to upheavals in the skies. And even if his thesis was unfounded, bad things can and do happen from time to time due to collisions between "worlds." Think, for example, of the demise of the dinosaurs 65 millions years ago due a collision with a seven-mile wide asteroid.

Still, Velikovsky's doomsday imaginings are a child's play compared to some catastrophic ideas that modern cosmologists have been putting forward. I don't mean the devastation caused by a collision with an asteroid or comet, but of whole universes colliding with one another, including with our own.

Welcome to cosmic catastrophism.

The universe began its existence 13.7 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since. However, current observations indicate that this expansion wasn't always at the same rate. Right at the beginning of time, the cosmos underwent a short period of hyper-accelerated expansion called inflation. According to this theory, proposed by MIT cosmologist Alan Guth in 1981, our whole universe could have emerged from a tiny patch of space that was stretched like a rubber band by the enormous factor of one hundred trillion trillion times (1026) in a fraction of a second. The universe we observe today fits within this stretched region, like an island in an ocean.

Now imagine that other portions of space, neighbors to that tiny patch that gave rise to our universe, also got stretched at different rates and at different times. We would have a universe filled with island-universes, each with its own history and possibly even types of matter, etc. This ocean of island-universes is called the multiverse.

Since physics is an empirical science, any hypothesis needs to be tested before being accepted by the community. This is as true for a ball rolling down a hill as for Guth's inflating universe or the multiverse. For the ball, we know how to apply Newton's laws of motion to describe its rolling and the results come out in excellent agreement with observations. Cosmic inflation predicts that our universe is geometrically flat (or almost) like the surface of a table but in three dimensions; it also predicts that space should be filled with radiation with a uniform temperature, as bathwater fills a bathtub. These two predictions have been confirmed, although a skeptic could argue that inflation was designed to accommodate these two observational facts about the universe. To its merit, inflation also offers an explanation as to how galaxies were first born and then grouped together in clusters, something that no other theory can do satisfactorily. Cosmologists like inflation a lot for its simplicity and range of explanation.

Since we can't receive information from outside our universe (or better, from outside our "horizon", the sphere that delimits how far light travelled in 13.7 billion years), how can we possibly test the existence of other universes "out there"? This has been a sticky point with the multiverse and indeed, the notion that the multiverse extends perhaps to spatial infinity is untestable. Infinity makes sense mathematically and may even be realized in Nature; but we will never know for sure.

However, we can do the next best thing, and see if at least neighboring universes exist. Just as with soap bubbles that vibrate when they collide with one another without popping, if another universe collided with ours in the distant past, the radiation inside our universe would have vibrated in response to the perturbations caused by the collision. These perturbations would be registered in the cosmic radiation and could, in principle, be observed. Matthew Kleban from New York University and his collaborators, and Anthony Aguirre from the University of California at Santa Cruz and his have been studying what kinds of signals would be left over from these dramatic events. Kleban found a unique signature, concentric rings where the radiation temperature would show a characteristic fluctuation. On top of the rings the radiation itself would be polarized, that is, it would oscillate in tandem in a specific direction of the sky. At least for now, no telltale rings have been found in the cosmic radiation, although the European satellite Planck promises to deliver more accurate polarization data that may shed light on the issue.

The bad news is that the probability of a collision with another universe increases with time: we could disappear at any instant: live life to the fullest!

The good news is that, although the multiverse as a whole may not be a testable scientific hypothesis, with some luck we may at least know if one or a few other universes exist. An observational test distinguishes science from idle speculation.