seanmcarroll

1. You could do that and more.
2. Don't you dare refer to Godzilla 1998 as my version.
3. Yup.

Easy -- repeated, well-documented evidence for something that can't be explained naturally. Ghosts, angels, God coming down and scolding me. My first instinct would always be to look for a natural explanation, but given enough data and a stubborn inability to explain it without supernatural intervention, I would willingly change my mind.

Time's up everyone! Thanks for some great, thought-provoking questions. Let's do it again sometime.

The biggest misconception is probably that the theory is developed by scientists saying "hey, let's add more universes!" The truth is that the extra universes are predicted by equations we developed for completely separate reasons.

http://discovermagazine.com/2011/oct/18-out-there-welcome-to-the-multiverse

For those following at home, "unitary" is physics-speak for "conserving information from moment to moment." And the answer is yes, inflation is unitary. Of course information might be dispersed far away, or hidden in other branches of the wave function, but that doesn't make inflation any different from other kinds of cosmological evolution.

I think BICEP2 will probably hold up -- but it's not unreasonable to be skeptical.