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By Root 432 0

astronomy, and other converging lines of evidence and logic, I would like to make the case for a multiverse, in which our universe—which was born in a big bang and will most likely expand forever and die with a whimper—is just one of many bubble universes all with different laws of nature.30 Those universes with the six magic numbers will generate matter, which coalesces into stars, some of which collapse into black holes and a singularity, the same entity out of which our universe may have sprung. Thus, universes like ours give birth to baby universes with those same six numbers, some of which develop intelligent life smart enough to discover this Darwinian process of cosmic evolution. A multiverse containing a multitude of universes fits this historical trajectory of expanding cosmic horizons and reinforces the long-standing Copernican principle that we are but fleeting actors on this planetary proscenium.

Of course, we should apply the rules of science and skepticism to the multiverse hypothesis as vigorously as we would any other. Are there any good reasons to believe in a multiverse? There are, and the models come in a variety of flavors that, in keeping with the pattern of numeration above, I’ll classify into six types.

1. The eternal-return multiverse. This form of multiverse arises out of an eternal boom-and-bust cycle of expansion and contractions of the universe, with our universe just one “episode” of the bubble’s eventual collapse and re-expansion in an eternal cycle. Cosmologist Sean Carroll argues “that space and time did exist before the Big Bang; what we call the Bang is a kind of transition from one phase to another.” As such, he says, “there is no such thing as an initial state, because time is eternal. In this case, we are imagining that the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the entire universe, although it’s obviously an important event in the history of our local region.”31 This multiverse seems unlikely because all the evidence to date shows that our universe is not only still expanding, but its expansion is accelerating. There does not appear to be enough matter in our universe to halt the expansion and bring it back into a big crunch that could launch it back into a new bubble out of another big bang.32

2. Multiple-creations multiverse. In the theory of inflationary cosmology, the universe sprang into existence from a bubble nucleation of space-time, and if this process of universe creation is natural then there may be multiple bubble nucleations that give rise to many universes that expand but remain separate from one another without any causal contact between them. If such causally disconnected universes existed, however, there is no way to get information from them, and so this is an inherently untestable hypothesis and thus is no better than the anthropic principle hypothesis.33

3. The many-worlds multiverse. This type of multiverse is derived out of the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which there are an infinite number of universes in which every possible outcome of every possible choice that has ever been available, or will be available, has happened in one of them. This multiverse is grounded in the bizarre findings of the famous “double-slit” experiment in which light is passed through two slits and forms an interference pattern of waves on a back surface (like throwing two stones in a pond and watching the concentric wave patterns interact, with crests and troughs adding and subtracting from one another). The spooky part comes when you send single photons of light one at a time through the two slits—they still form an interference wave pattern even though they are not interacting with other photons. How can this be? One answer is that the photons are interacting with photons in other universes! In this type of multiverse—sometimes configured as “parallel universes”—you could meet your doppelgänger, and depending on which universe you entered, your parallel self would be fairly similar or dissimilar to you, a theme that has become a staple of science fiction.