'scuse me while I kiss the sky

To the literal-minded reader of Genesis 11, humanity's baffling mix of myriad languages arose out of hubris, as God punished ancient architects by sowing linguistic confusion. It worked for a time.

But God had better act again, and soon. In the ultimate act of mad science, physicists are working on a way to create a mini-universe [subs. req.].

Sakai and his team realised that a seemingly stable monopole in our universe is always teetering on the brink of expansion - needing just a nudge to start it inflating. Hurling mass onto the monopole - increasing its energy density - will push it over the edge, leading to runaway inflation (www.arxiv.org/gr-qc/0602084). "Our calculations show that, given enough energy, the monopole will inflate eternally," Sakai says.

This process could be triggered naturally. According to Sakai, if a monopole floating through space collided with another massive object it would gain the mass needed to trigger inflation. One candidate is a cosmic string - a kind of high-energy rip in space-time. Though we have yet to see one, cosmic strings may have been created as a by-product of the big bang.

But since we have no cosmic strings - and we'd like to remain in control of the project - Sakai suggests we might be able to trigger inflation by hurling particles onto a monopole in an accelerator. This would add mass, and thus energy, to the monopole, and make it blow up into an entirely new universe.

It would be an extraordinary achievement, of course, but what happens then? It's one thing to create a universe, but quite another to know where to keep it. After all, an eternally inflating universe might be expected to take up quite a bit of space - the cupboard under the stairs simply won't do.

Actually this wouldn't be a problem, Sakai says. For a start, the process warps space-time enormously, so that it is no longer the Euclidean space we are familiar with. This highly distorted space doesn't have the same geometry as normal space, so it's not as if the universe would blow up and engulf us....

The question is, would it be worth all the effort? Linde thinks so. "I sat down and really thought about why we should even care about creating a universe in the laboratory," Linde says. "We put energy into the baby universe to create it, but we can't get any energy out of it - we can't mine its resources." Once it's formed, he adds, its space and time - though growing - is entirely divorced from our own. "We can't jump into this tiny thing and visit it," says Linde. "We don't seem to be able to communicate with it at all."

In the end, Linde realised he had overlooked the obvious motivation: good old-fashioned megalomania. "Just imagine if it's true and there's even a small chance it really could work," he says. "In this perspective, each of us can become a god."

Woe unto us all.