The patchwork universe

Why there might be many more universes besides our own

The idea of parallel universes may seem bizarre, but physics has found all sorts of reasons why they should exist.

By Philip Ball

21 March 2016

Is our Universe one of many?

The idea of parallel universes, once consigned to science fiction, is now becoming respectable among scientists – at least, among physicists, who have a tendency to push ideas to the limits of what is conceivable.

In fact there are almost too many other potential universes. Physicists have proposed several candidate forms of "multiverse", each made possible by a different aspect of the laws of physics.

The trouble is, virtually by definition we probably cannot ever visit these other universes to confirm that they exist. So the question is, can we devise other ways to test for the existence of entire universes that we cannot see or touch?

Worlds within worlds

In at least some of these alternative universes, it has been suggested, we have doppelgängers living lives much like – perhaps almost identical to – our own.

That idea tickles our ego and awakens our fantasies, which is doubtless why the multiverse theories, however far-out they seem, enjoy so much popularity. We have embraced alternative universes in works of fiction ranging from Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle to movies like Sliding Doors.

Indeed, there is nothing new about the idea of a multiverse, as philosopher of religion Mary-Jane Rubenstein explains in her 2014 book Worlds Without End.

In the mid-16th century, Copernicus argued that the Earth is not the centre of the Universe. Several decades later, Galileo's telescope showed him stars beyond measure: a glimpse of the vastness of the cosmos.

So at the end of the 16th century, the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno speculated that the Universe might be infinite, populated by an infinite number of inhabited worlds.

The idea of a Universe containing many solar systems became commonplace in the 18th Century.

By the early 20th Century, the Irish physicist Edmund Fournier d'Albe was even suggesting that there might be an infinite regression of "nested" universes at different scales, ever larger and ever smaller. In this view, an individual atom might be like a real, inhabited solar system.

Scientists today reject that notion of a "Russian doll" multiverse, but they have postulated several other ways in which multiverses might exist. Here are five of them, along with a rough guide to how likely they are.

The patchwork universe

The simplest multiverse is a consequence of the infinite size of our own Universe.

We do not actually know if the Universe is infinite, but we cannot rule it out. If it is, then it must be divided into a patchwork of regions that cannot see one another.

This is simply because the regions are too far apart for light to have crossed the distance. Our Universe is only 13.8 billion years old, so any regions further than 13.8 billion light years apart are utterly cut off.

To all intents and purposes, these regions are separate universes. But they will not stay that way: eventually light will cross the divide and the universes will merge.

If our Universe really does contain an infinite number of "island universes" like ours, with matter and stars and planets, there must be worlds identical to Earth somewhere out there.

It may sound incredibly unlikely that atoms should come together by chance into an exact replica of Earth, or a replica that is exact except for the colour of your socks. But in a genuine infinity of worlds, even that strange place must exist. In fact, it must exist countless times.

If so, then somewhere almost unimaginably far off, a being identical to me is typing out these words, and wondering if his editor is going to insist on radical revisions.[nice try Phil - ed]

By the same logic, rather farther away there is an entire observable universe identical to ours. This distance can be estimated at about 10 to the power 10 to the power 118 metres.

It is possible that this is not the case at all. Maybe the Universe is not infinite. Or even if it is, maybe all the matter is concentrated in our corner of it, in which case most of the other universes could be empty. But there is no obvious reason why that should be, and no sign so far that matter gets sparser the farther away we look.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 940