Our Universe can be only one fragment of space and time among the endless “archipelago of Universes”

(ORDO NEWS) — Is our part of the universe a tiny and unusual fragment of a vast archipelago of universes?

“By the end of this century, we should have information about whether we live in a multiverse and how diverse the “universes” that make it up are.

The answer to this question will determine how we should interpret the “biologically friendly” universe we live in (sharing it with any aliens we may one day come into contact with)” said Lord Martin Rees, chief British cosmologist and astrophysicist.

What we traditionally call the “universe” – the aftermath of “our” big bang – could be just one island, just one piece of space and time in a possibly infinite archipelago, continues Reese, UK‘s chief astrophysicist.

There may have been many big explosions, not just one.

However, if the universe extends far enough, anything can happen – somewhere far beyond our horizon, a replica of the Earth may even exist.”

This requires the space to be VERY large – it is described by a number not just with a million digits, but with 10 to the power of 100 digits: a one followed by 100 zeros.

Ten to the power of 100 is called a googol, and a number with a googol of zeros is called a googolplex.

“If space is truly infinite,” writes cosmologist Dan Hooper, head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in At the Edge of Time, “the implications would be staggering.

In infinite space, it is difficult to find a reason why there would not be an infinite number of galaxies, stars and planets, and even an infinite number of intelligent or conscious beings scattered throughout this boundless volume.

That’s the essence of infinity: it takes things that are otherwise very unlikely and makes them inevitable.”

The Frightening Consequences of the Multiverse

The universe that we see around us is a tiny piece of a much larger multiverse. The multiverse theory claims that what we’ve been calling “the universe” all this time is actually nothing of the sort.

Rather, it is only an infinitesimal fragment of a much larger and more complex system – an ensemble of “universes”, or individual cosmic regions, as Paul Davis writes in The Goldilocks Mystery: Why is the Universe Suitable for Life?

When asked about the possibility of ever obtaining evidence for the existence of another universe, Yasunori Nomura, director of the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics, replied: “This picture of many universes – the multiverse – is not a random idea, but a specific scenario proposed by fundamental physics theories such as string theory.

Thus, we could test the predictions of this scenario without even traveling to another universe.

For example, our universe may collide with another universe, the trace of which, in principle, can be seen in the sky, in particular, in the form of a characteristic pattern in the so-called cosmic microwave background radiation.

“Furthermore,” Nomura explains in his letter, “according to the multi-universe scenario, our own universe must be ‘negatively curved’, that is, have certain geometric properties.

Although the theory does not predict how large this curvature is, this prediction can be confirmed in future observations.

Perhaps more importantly, if future observations show that the curvature of our universe is positive rather than negative, then the version of the multiverse that many physicists are now talking about will be excluded from observations.”

When we asked Nomura if it was likely that the neighboring universe would have different laws of physics, he replied: “According to what we currently know, we expect other universes to have very different properties than ours.

“For example, the nature of elementary particles and the law that governs their behavior have different forms.

For some universes, even the number of dimensions of space-time can be different. Of course, we expect that the universes “adjacent” to ours look very different from our”.

“This, however, does not mean that there is no physical law that governs the multiverse. For example, all universes are expected to obey the principles of quantum mechanics.

It’s just that some properties of our universe that we traditionally considered fundamental are not as fundamental as we thought.

Among them the nature of elementary particles – even the existence of an electron, a photon, and so on.

“In some regions of space, far beyond our observations,” Dan Hooper wrote in an email to The Daily Galaxy, referring to the theory of perpetual inflation and the inflationary multiverse: “The laws of physics can be very different from those we find in our local universe .

There may be various forms of matter that experience the action of various forces. In this sense, what we call “the laws of physics”, instead of being a universal fact of nature, may be a fact of the environment that varies from place to place or from time to time.”

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