Is it possible to go to a parallel world?

How to Get There? – But what we want to know is: could you ever get to another space-time? That depends. The American theoretical physicist and string theorist extraordinaire Brian Greene, of Columbia University, argues that the plausibility of multiversal travel—conceding that parallel universes really do exist—hinges on which multiverse concept you subscribe to.

If you are an advocate of a multiple big bang multiverse, then that would mean that leaving our universe to travel to another would be just as impossible as travelling back to the time before the big bang that resulted in our universe even happened. Now, if you believe a quantum physics-dominated notion of parallel universes, then there’s no need to travel to other universes, because you are already inhabiting multiple alternate universes (though not necessarily all of them).

Can’t decide which dress to wear? No matter—you’ve worn them both, in two separate parallel universes. Meanwhile, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku believes that our universe will end up in a ” big freeze,” and that technology can one day allow us to travel between universes.

• Neil deGrasse Tyson, on the other hand, says that if you come from a universe with higher dimensions, then it could be as easy to move between dimensions as stepping from one room to another.
• And in string theory —one of the leading contenders in bridging the seemingly insuperable gulf sundering quantum mechanics and general relativity—the assumption is that we actually have far more dimensions in this universe than we previously thought and that we just fail to detect them because they are actually very small, curled up in the infinitely minute, trans-subatomic realms beyond the reach of our instruments.

But how can we prove (or disprove) any of these arguments without gaining first-hand experience of it? Much as many aspects of our universe still remain elusive to us, it’s currently impossible to acquire any proof to confirm which of these hypotheses is right.

But while we don’t have the means to definitively prove whether alternate universes do exist, and whether we could traverse borders to move from one to another, it’s highly unlikely that a topic as stimulating as this will disappear anytime soon, either in science fiction or in real-life science. Meanwhile, physicists are at it.

Watch this brief video of physicists going head to head with each other on string theory, Math, and potentially embarrassing alien encounters.

Is it possible to travel between universes?

So if I want to meet myself, how do I get there? Can we travel between multiverses? – Unfortunately, no. Scientists don’t think it’s possible to travel between universes, at least not yet. “Unless a whole lot of physics we know that’s pretty solidly established is wrong, you can’t travel to these multiverses,” Siegfried says.

What does it mean when a person is in a parallel universe?

noun

1. Physics, any of a hypothetical collection of undetectable universes that are like our known universe but have branched off from our universe due to a quantum-level event.: See also multiverse 1,
2. (in cosmology) a hypothetical universe that coexists with our known universe but may operate under fundamentally different laws of physics.: See also multiverse 1,

1. Also called alternate universe, alternative universe, (in science fiction, fantasy, etc.) a separate universe or world that coexists with our known universe but is very different from it.: Compare dimension (def.8),
2. a realm of existence and experience that is fundamentally different from the one that most humans share; a separate reality: I don’t understand him—I think he lives in a parallel universe.

How do parallel realities work?

So how does it work? – Multi-view pixels allow different content to be delivered in different directions Parallel reality uses special “multi-view” pixels that emit different light colours in thousands of different directions. So for two people looking at the same pixel one stood to the right might see a blue light and one stood to the left a red one.

• Misapplied Science’s software then coordinates all the pixels that make up the display together to provide different images from different stand points and as a result create different personalised messages for each individual.
• So far so clever.
• So how does the software know who you are and where you are in proximity to the display? When you scan your boarding pass you are associated with your flight info – not by facial recognition, thought this will likely come, but as a ‘discrete blob’ in the tech’s camera.

As you move around close to the parallel-reality display the camera tracks your position so the display can point your personalised messaging to your precise location. Although Delta are hoping to roll this out on a single display in Detroit later this year, there are still some limitations.

• Currently, the display only supports 256 colours limiting the quality of photos and videos, the displays are currently limited to 100 concurrent users and you need to stand a minimum of 15 feet away for the targeting to be truly effective.
• Although with each iteration Misapplied Science is improving the technology and believe a time where the system can support over a thousand concurrent users is not far away.

Both Delta and Misapplied Science are keen to alleviate the obvious privacy concerns. In the case of Delta by making this an opt-in system and insisting no information will be shared and Misapplied Science by stating they have created a “a display technology, not a new means of monitoring people”.

1. However, it’s not unreasonable to speculate about as-yet-unknown implementations of parallel reality and the privacy concerns that might follow.
2. But that is a discussion for another time, for now lets just marvel at a truly innovative piece of technology.
3. Privacy concerns aside the potential applications for this kind of technology are huge and encompass everything from traffic signage, targeted display advertising, retail, through enhancing festival, theme-park and sports experiences.

And it’s all coming a lot sooner than you think!, Technical Director : Parallel Reality – coming to a screen near you

Does parallel reality exist?

It’s the stuff of science fiction — parallel worlds that fan out in time and space. But do such parallel worlds exist? It turns out that at least some physics theories do allow for the existence of parallel universes — at least on the quantum level.

What universe are we in?

Our planet is part of a discrete solar system in an arm of the spiral shaped Milky Way Galaxy. Our galaxy is only one of billions of other galaxies that exist within the universe. How many planets are in our solar system? There are eight planets in our solar system and three dwarf planets.

Do Multiverses exist?

The multiverse is the hypothetical set of all universes, Together, these universes are presumed to comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, energy, information, and the physical laws and constants that describe them.

The different universes within the multiverse are called “parallel universes”, “other universes”, “alternate universes”, or “many worlds”. One common assumption is that the multiverse is a “patchwork quilt of separate universes all bound by the same laws of physics.” The concept of multiple universes, or a multiverse, has been discussed throughout history, with origins in ancient Greek philosophy.

It has evolved over time and has been debated in various fields, including cosmology, physics, and philosophy. Some physicists argue that the multiverse is a philosophical notion rather than a scientific hypothesis, as it cannot be empirically falsified.

• In recent years, there have been proponents and skeptics of multiverse theories within the physics community.
• Although some scientists have analyzed data in search of evidence for other universes, no statistically significant evidence has been found.
• Critics argue that the multiverse concept lacks testability and falsifiability, which are essential for scientific inquiry, and that it raises unresolved metaphysical issues.

Max Tegmark and Brian Greene have proposed different classification schemes for multiverses and universes. Tegmark’s four-level classification consists of Level I: an extension of our universe, Level II: universes with different physical constants, Level III: many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and Level IV: ultimate ensemble,

1. Brian Greene’s nine types of multiverses include quilted, inflationary, brane, cyclic, landscape, quantum, holographic, simulated, and ultimate.
2. The ideas explore various dimensions of space, physical laws, and mathematical structures to explain the existence and interactions of multiple universes.
3. Some other multiverse concepts include twin-world models, cyclic theories, M-theory, and black-hole cosmology.

The anthropic principle suggests that the existence of a multitude of universes, each with different physical laws, could explain the fine-tuning of our own universe for conscious life. The weak anthropic principle posits that we exist in one of the few universes that support life.

Is it possible to go back in time?

Experimental results – Certain experiments carried out give the impression of reversed causality, but fail to show it under closer examination. The delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment performed by Marlan Scully involves pairs of entangled photons that are divided into “signal photons” and “idler photons”, with the signal photons emerging from one of two locations and their position later measured as in the double-slit experiment,

Depending on how the idler photon is measured, the experimenter can either learn which of the two locations the signal photon emerged from or “erase” that information. Even though the signal photons can be measured before the choice has been made about the idler photons, the choice seems to retroactively determine whether or not an interference pattern is observed when one correlates measurements of idler photons to the corresponding signal photons.

However, since interference can be observed only after the idler photons are measured and they are correlated with the signal photons, there is no way for experimenters to tell what choice will be made in advance just by looking at the signal photons, only by gathering classical information from the entire system; thus causality is preserved.

The experiment of Lijun Wang might also show causality violation since it made it possible to send packages of waves through a bulb of caesium gas in such a way that the package appeared to exit the bulb 62 nanoseconds before its entry, but a wave package is not a single well-defined object but rather a sum of multiple waves of different frequencies (see Fourier analysis ), and the package can appear to move faster than light or even backward in time even if none of the pure waves in the sum do so.

This effect cannot be used to send any matter, energy, or information faster than light, so this experiment is understood not to violate causality either. The physicists Günter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz, claim to have violated Einstein’s theory of relativity by transmitting photons faster than the speed of light.

1. They say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons traveled “instantaneously” between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3 ft (0.91 m) apart, using a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling,
2. Nimtz told New Scientist magazine: “For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of.” However, other physicists say that this phenomenon does not allow information to be transmitted faster than light.

Aephraim Steinberg, a quantum optics expert at the University of Toronto, Canada, uses the analogy of a train traveling from Chicago to New York, but dropping off train cars at each station along the way, so that the center of the train moves forward at each stop; in this way, the speed of the center of the train exceeds the speed of any of the individual cars.

Shengwang Du claims in a peer-reviewed journal to have observed single photons’ precursors, saying that they travel no faster than c in a vacuum. His experiment involved slow light as well as passing light through a vacuum. He generated two single photons, passing one through rubidium atoms that had been cooled with a laser (thus slowing the light) and passing one through a vacuum.

Both times, apparently, the precursors preceded the photons’ main bodies, and the precursor traveled at c in a vacuum. According to Du, this implies that there is no possibility of light traveling faster than c and, thus, no possibility of violating causality.

What is our universe called?

What is our universe called? Join Vedantu’s FREE Mastercalss Answer Verified Hint: Everything that we are able to see around us forms a part of the universe. Our universe consists of various stars, galaxies, Nebula, black holes, planets, etc. All the matter that we are able to observe with the help of telescopes also forms a part of our universe.

Complete step-by-step answer: Universe is a name given to all the matter around us.Our universe is also called the cosmos. It is originally a greek word. In early days it was thought that our Galaxy constituted the entire universe. Now we now know the information that we live on planet Earth, which forms a part of the Solar system created by the gravitational pull of our sun and our Sun forms a tiny part of our Milky way galaxy.

This galaxy is just one of billions which form a part of our universe. The need to understand the universe or cosmos around us gave rise to a critical field of science called cosmology. Additional Information: A few theories suggest that our universe might not be the only universe.

There might be multiple universes often called multiverses. Note: When we talk of the universe, we often talk about the ‘observable’ universe. As the Big Bang happened 13.9 billion years ago, we are only able to observe the universe to the time after the big bang. This is so because light takes some time to travel from its source to us.

If a celestial object is present at a distance of 10 Light year from us then light emitted by it 10 years ago is seen by us today. Therefore as we observe our universe, we observe it back in time and there is a limit to our observations because the galaxies/stars tend to move farther and farther apart.

How many dimensions exist?

X-ray: NASA/CXC/PSU/L.Townsley et al; Optical: UKIRT; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech) The world as we know it has three dimensions of space—length, width and depth—and one dimension of time. But there’s the mind-bending possibility that many more dimensions exist out there.

1. According to string theory, one of the leading physics model of the last half century, the universe operates with 10 dimensions,
2. But that raises a big question: If there are 10 dimensions, then why don’t we experience all of them or haven’t detected them? Lisa Grossman at ScienceNews reports that a new paper suggests an answer, showing that those dimensions are so tiny and so fleeting that we currently can’t detect them.

It’s difficult to completely explain the mathematics behind string theory without putting on a graduate seminar or two, but in essence dimensions five through ten have to do with possibility and include all possible futures and all possible pasts including realities with a totally different physics than those in our universe.

• If two protons smash together at high enough speeds, they have the ability to create a tiny black hole that would exist for just a fraction of a second before disappearing, according to a new study, which hasn’t been peer-reviewed, on the preprint server arXiv.org,
• The collision would open up a little bubble of interdimensional space where the laws of physics are different than ours, leading to an event known as vacuum decay.

In quantum physics, vacuum decay implies that if the interdimensional space was large enough, we’d be toast. With enough gravity to interact with our world, the newly formed ” Cosmic Death Bubble ” would grow at the speed of light, rapidly change the physics of our universe, render it uninhabitable and effectively zap us out of existence.

“If you’re standing nearby when the bubble starts to expand, you don’t see it coming,” the study’s co-author, physicist Katie Mack of North Carolina State University, tells Grossman. “If it’s coming at you from below, your feet stop existing before your mind realizes that.” Ultrahigh energy cosmic rays are bashing into each other all the time with enough energy to start this process.

If extra dimensions were large enough to allow the death bubble to form, the researchers found, it would have happened thousands of times already. The fact that we still exist is one circumstantial piece of evidence that other dimensions are ultra-tiny.

The team calculated that they must be smaller than 16 nanometers, too small for their gravity to influence much in our world and hundreds of times smaller than previous calculations, Grossman reports. The new study comes on the tail of another study about extra dimensions published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics published in July.

Mara Johnson-Groh at LiveScience reports that one of the big questions in physics is why the expansion of the universe is accelerating. One theory is that gravity is leaking out of our universe into other dimensions. To test this idea, researchers looked at data from recently discovered gravitational waves,

If our universe was leaking gravity through these other dimensions, the researchers reasoned, then the gravitational waves would be weaker than expected after traveling across the universe. But the researchers found they didn’t lose any energy on their long journey, meaning other dimensions either don’t exist or are so tiny they don’t affect gravity very much, if at all.

“General relativity says gravity should be working in three dimensions, and show that that’s what we see,” physicist Kris Pardo of Princeton, lead author of the July study, tells Johnson-Groh. The latest study also concludes that the size of extra dimensions is so small that it precludes many theories about gravity leaking out of our universe.

How many parallel universes are there?

You’ve likely imagined it before: another Universe out there, just like this one, where all the random events and chances that brought about our reality exactly as it is played out just the same. In every way, every quantum event that had a set of possibilities as to which outcomes could have occurred, have played out identically in that other Universe to the one we inhabit today.

• Except, that is, until right now, when you made one fateful decision in this Universe, you took an alternate path in that other Universe.
• These two Universes, which ran parallel to one another for so long, suddenly diverged.
• Perhaps our Universe, with the version of events we’re familiar with, isn’t the only one out there.

Perhaps there are other Universes, perhaps even with different versions of ourselves, different histories and alternate outcomes from what we’ve experienced. This isn’t merely fiction — although it plays an incredible role in a variety of fictional settings — but one of the most exciting possibilities brought about through theoretical physics. This artist’s conception shows a logarithmic view of the observable Universe. The Solar System gives way to the Milky Way, which gives way to nearby galaxies which then give way to the large-scale structure and the hot, dense plasma of the Big Bang at the outskirts.

Each line-of-sight that we can observe contains all of these epochs, but the quest for the most distant observed object will not be complete until we’ve mapped out the entire Universe. With each passing new year, another few tens of thousands of galaxies potentially become visible. ( Credit : Pablo Carlos Budassi) As vast as our Universe might be, the part that we can see, access, affect, or be affected by is finite and quantifiable.

Including photons and neutrinos, it contains some 10 90 particles, clumped and clustered together into approximately 6-to-20 trillion galaxies, with perhaps another 9-to-30 trillion galaxies that will reveal themselves to us as the Universe continues to expand.

1. Each such galaxy comes with around a trillion stars inside it (on average), and these galaxies clump together in an enormous, cosmos-spanning web that extends for 46 billion light-years away from us in all directions.
2. But, despite what our intuition might tell us, that doesn’t mean we’re at the center of a finite Universe.

In fact, the full suite of evidence indicates something quite to the contrary. The reason the Universe appears finite in size to us — the reason we can’t see anything that’s more than a specific distance away — isn’t because the Universe is actually finite in size, but is rather because the Universe has only existed in its present state for a finite amount of time. If you look farther and farther away, you also look farther and farther into the past. If the number of galaxies, the densities and properties of those galaxies, and other cosmic properties like the temperature and expansion rate of the Universe didn’t appear to change, you’d have evidence of a Universe that was constant in time.

• Credit : NASA/ESA/A.
• Feild (STScI)) If you learn nothing else about the Big Bang, it should be this: the Universe was not constant in space or in time, but rather has evolved from a more uniform, hotter, denser state to a clumpier, cooler, and more diffuse state today.
• As we go to earlier and earlier times, the Universe appears smoother and with fewer, less-evolved galaxies; as we look to later times, the galaxies are larger and more massive, consisting of older stars, with greater distances separating galaxies, groups, and clusters from one another.

This has given us a rich Universe, containing many relics from our shared cosmic history, including:

• many generations of stars,
• an ultra-cold background of leftover radiation,
• galaxies that appear to recede away from us ever-more-rapidly the more distant they are,
• with a fundamental limit to how far back we can see.

The limit to our cosmic perspective is set by the distance that light has had the ability to travel since the moment of the Big Bang. But this in no way means that there isn’t more Universe out there beyond the portion that’s accessible to us. In fact, there’s both observational and theoretical arguments that point to the existence of much more Universe beyond what we see: perhaps even infinitely more. The observable Universe might be 46 billion light-years in all directions from our point of view, but there’s certainly more, unobservable Universe, perhaps even an infinite amount, just like ours beyond that. Over time, we’ll be able to see more of it, eventually revealing approximately 2.3 times as many galaxies as we can presently view.

Even for the parts we never see, there are things we’ll want to know about them. Gathering as much information as possible is vital toward the endeavor. ( Credit : Frederic Michel and Andrew Z. Colvin/Wikimedia Commons; annotations by E. Siegel) A finite Universe would display a number of telltale signals that enable us to determine that we don’t live in an infinite sea of spacetime.

We’d measure our spatial curvature, and could find that the Universe was shaped like a sphere in some way, where if you traveled in a straight line for long enough, you’d return to your starting point. You could look for repeating patterns in the sky, where the same object appeared in different locations simultaneously. The appearance of different angular sizes of fluctuations in the CMB results in different spatial curvature scenarios. Presently, the Universe appears to be flat, but we have only measured down to about the 0.4% level. At a more precise level, we may discover some level of intrinsic curvature, after all, but what we’ve observed is enough to tell us that if the Universe is curved, it’s only curved on scales that are ~(250)³ times (or more than 15 million times) larger than our presently-observable Universe is.

( Credit : Smoot Cosmology Group/LBL) Of course, we can’t know that for certain. If all you had access to was your own backyard, you couldn’t measure the curvature of the Earth, because the portion you had access to was indistinguishable from flat. Based on the portion of the Universe we see, we can state that if the Universe is finite and does curve back on itself, it must have at least millions of times the volume of the portion we can see, with no upper limit to that figure.

But theoretically, the implications of our observations paint a picture that’s even more tantalizing. You see, we can extrapolate the Big Bang backward to an arbitrarily hot, dense, expanding state, and find that it couldn’t have gotten infinitely hot and dense early on. This diagram shows, to scale, how spacetime evolves/expands in equal time increments if your Universe is dominated by matter, radiation, or the energy inherent to space itself (i.e., during inflation or dark energy dominance), with the latter corresponding to the inflationary phase that preceded and set up the hot Big Bang.

Although all of these model universes expand toward infinite size, they approach it at different rates, with the “space itself” solution approaching infinity in a fundamentally more quick fashion than the other two. Credit : E. Siegel/Beyond the Galaxy In a Universe filled with matter or radiation, the expansion rate will decrease over time, as the Universe becomes less dense.

But if the energy in inherent to space itself, the density will not drop, but rather remains constant, even as the Universe expands. In a matter or radiation dominated Universe, the expansion rate slows as time goes on, and distant points recede from one another at ever slower speeds.

1. But with exponential expansion, the rate doesn’t drop at all, and distant locations — as time goes on incrementally — get twice as far away, then four times, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, etc.
2. Because the expansion is not just exponential but also incredibly rapid, “doubling” happens on timescale of around 10 -35 seconds.

This implies:

• by the time 10 -34 seconds have passed, the Universe is around 10 3 (or 1000) times its initial size,
• by the time 10 -33 seconds have passed, the Universe is around 10 30 (or 1000 10 ) times its initial size,
• by the time 10 -32 seconds have passed, the Universe is around 10 300 (or 1000 100 ) times its initial size,

and so on. Exponential isn’t so powerful because it’s fast; it’s powerful because it’s relentless. Now, obviously the Universe didn’t continue to expand in this fashion forever, because we’re here. Inflation occurred for some amount of time in the past, but then ended, setting up the Big Bang. Inflation ends (top) when a ball rolls into the valley. But the inflationary field is a quantum one (middle), spreading out over time. While many regions of space (purple, red and cyan) will see inflation end, many more (green, blue) will see inflation continue, potentially for an eternity (bottom).

The quantum nature of inflation means that it ends in some “pockets” of the Universe and continues in others. ( Credit : E. Siegel/Beyond the Galaxy) One useful way to think about inflation is like a ball rolling very slowly down from the top of a very flat hill, as shown in the top panel, above. As long as the ball remains near the topmost plateau, it rolls slowly and inflation continues, causing the Universe to expand exponentially.

Once the ball reaches the edge and rolls down into the valley, however, inflation ends. As it oscillates back-and-forth in the valley, that rolling behavior causes the energy from inflation to dissipate, converting it into matter-and-radiation, ending the inflationary state and beginning the hot Big Bang.

1. Inflation isn’t like a ball — which is a classical field — but is rather like a wave that spreads out over time, like a quantum field.
2. As time goes on and more-and-more space gets created due to inflation, certain regions, probabilistically, are going to be more likely to see inflation come to an end, while others will be more likely to see inflation continue.
3. The regions where inflation ends will give rise to a Big Bang and a Universe like ours, while the regions where it doesn’t will continue to inflate for longer.
4. As time goes on, because of the dynamics of expansion, no two regions where inflation ends will ever interact or collide; the regions where inflation doesn’t end will expand between them, pushing these “bubble Universes” apart from one another.

A representation of the different parallel “worlds” that might exist in other pockets of the multiverse. As time goes on, more and more possibilities must arise, meaning that the number of Universes that must exist to contain them all must rise as well, at least as quickly, or no two universes will ever be identical. Travel the Universe with astrophysicist Ethan Siegel. Subscribers will get the newsletter every Saturday. All aboard! We don’t know if the regions where inflation ended are all the same as one another, with the same laws of nature, fundamental constants, and quantum properties and fluctuations as our own Universe. The Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics holds that there are an infinite number of parallel universes that exist, holding all possible outcomes of a quantum mechanical system, and that making an observation simply chooses one path. This interpretation is philosophically interesting, but has no physical meaning if there isn’t enough “universe” out there to physically hold all of these possibilities within it.

• Where you chose the job overseas instead of the one that kept you in your country?
• Where you stood up to the bully instead of letting yourself be taken advantage of?
• Where you kissed the one-who-got-away at the end of the night, instead of letting them go?
• And where the life-or-death event that you or your loved one faced at some point in the past had a different outcome?

Maybe. It’s certainly wishful thinking to believe so. But for that to actually be our physical reality, those unknowns about our Universe need to have specific answers that may not be very likely. The multiverse idea states that there are very large numbers of Universes like our own out there, and others whose properties might have extreme, fundamental differences. But in order for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics to be physically real, there must be a place (i.e., a real Universe) for these parallel outcomes to reside in, and unless inflation occurred for an infinite amount of time, the math doesn’t work out right to contain them.

Credit : Lee Davy/flickr/cc by 2.0 First off, the inflationary state that preceded the Big Bang must have lasted for not just a long time, but a truly infinite amount of time. Let’s assume that the Universe inflated — i.e., expanded exponentially — for 13.8 billion years. That would create enough volume of space for 10^(10 50 ) Universes just like our own, or 10 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 Universes.

That is, no doubt, truly a gargantuan number. But it’s still a finite number, and if it’s not bigger than the number of possible outcomes, it isn’t big enough to contain the possibilities that the notion of parallel Universes would necessitate. So let’s think about quantifying the number of possible outcomes.

There are ~10 90 particles in our Universe, including photons and neutrinos, and we require that every one of them have the same history of interactions since the Big Bang that they experienced here to duplicate our Universe. We can quantify the odds by taking 10 90 particles and giving them 13.8 billion years to interact.

We then have to ask how many possible outcomes there are given the laws of quantum physics and the rate of particle interactions. As large as a double exponential is — as 10^(10 50 ) is — it’s far smaller than our estimate for the number of possible quantum outcomes for 10 90 particles, which is somewhat larger (10 90 )! That ! stands for factorial, where 5! is 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 *1 = 120, but 1000! is 1000 * 999 * 998 * * 3 * 2 * 1 and is a 2477-digit number. Bubble chamber tracks from Fermilab, revealing the charge, mass, energy and momentum of the particles created. Although there are only a few dozen particles whose tracks are shown here, there are already an astronomically large number of possible outcomes that could have resulted from the interactions of the particles shown here over the fraction-of-a-second that their interactions were recorded.

The number of possible quantum outcomes rises much faster, in any system, than we’re used to from large numbers. Credit : Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory/DOE/NSF It’s true: both numbers go to infinity. The number of possible parallel Universes tends to infinity, but does so at a particular (exponential) rate, but the number of possible quantum outcomes for a Universe like ours also tends to infinity, and does so much more quickly.

As both mathematicians and John Green fans know, some infinities are bigger than others, What this means is that, unless inflation has been occurring for a truly infinite amount of time, there are no parallel Universes out there identical to this one. While many independent Universes are predicted to be created in an inflating spacetime, inflation never ends everywhere at once, but rather only in distinct, independent areas separated by space that continues to inflate. This is where the scientific motivation for a Multiverse comes from, and why no two Universes will ever collide.

The Universe doesn’t expand into anything; it itself is expanding. Credit : Ozytive/Public Domain Although we cannot prove whether inflation went on for an infinite duration or not, there is a theorem that demonstrates that inflationary spacetimes cannot be extrapolated back for arbitrary amounts of time; they have no beginning if so, and are called past-timelike-incomplete,

Inflation may give us an enormously huge number of Universes that reside within a greater multiverse, but there simply aren’t enough of them to create an alternate, parallel you. The number of possible outcomes simply increases too fast for even an inflationary Universe to contain them all.

In all the multiverse, there is likely only one you. You must make this Universe count, as there is no alternate version of you. Take the dream job. Stand up for yourself. Navigate through the difficulties with no regrets, and go all-out every day of your life. There is no other Universe where this version of you exists, and no future awaiting you other than the one you live into reality.

Make it count.

Do we live in different dimensions?

Secret dimensions – In everyday life, we inhabit a space of three dimensions – a vast ‘cupboard’ with height, width and depth, well known for centuries. Less obviously, we can consider time as an additional, fourth dimension, as Einstein famously revealed.

Is parallel universe the same as parallel reality?

A parallel reality, Parallel reality is really an alternate reality, Parallel Universe or Dimension however is fundamentally different because it is similar to this physical world but exists in another space the parallel nature of this is that they never meet.

What is the concept of parallel lives?

We coined the term ‘parallel lives’ for the idea that a system is allowed to be in a superposition of several states, but that all splittings occur locally. This was directly inspired by the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory, whose pioneer was Hugh Everett more than six decades ago.

What does in parallel reality mean?

A parallel universe or alternate universe, better known as alternate/parallel reality, is a hypothetical concept according to which there exists an imaginary world parallel to one’s own. The idea behind this is that our universe doesn’t exist alone, as there are other universes that exist alongside our own.

Did Einstein believe in multiverse?

Stephen Hawking’s final theory could prove the existence of the multiverse | CBC Radio Weeks before he died, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking finished laying out the groundwork on a theory he hoped would prove the existence of other universes outside our own. “Some of these universes are completely empty, and others are full of black holes, and yet others have stars and galaxies and life.” The concept of the multiverse stems from the big bang theory — Albert Einstein’s once controversial, but now widely accepted, idea that the universe instantaneously expanded from a tiny point called a singularity.

Where do parallel universes come from?

Our universe is immense. Earth is one of eight planets that revolve around our sun, which is a star, and there are billions or maybe even trillions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. With existing technology, we can see well beyond our own galaxy into the observable universe, which has a diameter of 92 billion light-years and contains perhaps two trillion galaxies,

1. All available evidence indicates the universe is much, much bigger than what we can observe — and might be infinitely large.
2. Parallel universe theory explores the possibility that the universe contains planets and galaxies similar to our own or even that an infinite number of separate universes may form a grand multiverse.

While the idea of a parallel universe has long been a popular plot line in movies, TV shows and books, it’s now supported by compelling scientific theories that help explain observations about the known universe. The concept of a multiverse arises from inflation theory, string theory and quantum mechanics.

Who invented parallel universe?

The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family –

Peter Byrne

Oxford University Press: 2010.348 pp. $45, £25 9780199552276 | ISBN: 978-0-1995-5227-6 The ‘many worlds’ theory of quantum mechanics is one of the most logical, bizarre and ridiculed ideas in the history of human thought. In The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III, investigative journalist Peter Byrne details the short, fragmented life of the physicist who created the theory.

A compulsive model-builder, Hugh Everett III “burned to reduce the complexity of the universe to rational formulae”. Yet while he tried to grasp everything through physics, he kept losing track of his own life. Everett entered Princeton University in 1953 to study mathematics, attracted to the new field of game theory.

A year later he switched to physics, intrigued by quantum mechanics and its measurement problem. Quantum mechanics uses a wave equation to encapsulate the protean qualities of the microscopic world, which it represents as a superposition of many possible states.

Whenever such a quantum system is measured, or interacts in any way with the classical world, it abruptly adopts one of these states, corresponding to a particular observation. In the prevailing explanation for this strange quantum behaviour — the Copenhagen interpretation, promulgated in the 1920s by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg — the wave is not a physical entity but describes the probabilities for each possible measurement.

The superposed states collapse when a reading is taken and an outcome is realized. The Universe is cast in this interpretation as a cosmic apartheid, split into a determinate real domain and an indeterminate quantum domain. The measurement switch between them is abrupt, magically eliminating all possibilities bar one. Hugh Everett III: his ‘many worlds’ theory was ignored for years after it was published. Credit: COURTESY OF M. EVERETT In his 1957 doctoral dissertation, written under the supervision of John Wheeler, Everett found a simple yet outlandish way to avoid this bizarre collapse of the wave function.

1. When a quantum system is measured, he proposed, the alternative possibilities don’t vanish — the system splits into a series of parallel, almost-identical worlds.
2. Each of these worlds itself keeps branching as more measurements unfold, the junctures being at every place where the quantum domain contacts the classical world.

“Schizophrenia with a vengeance,” wrote one of Everett’s sympathizers. Everett’s idea wasn’t taken seriously, even though it worked. Fellow graduate student Charles Misner recalls that “no one could fault his logic, even if they couldn’t stomach his conclusions”, adding that: “The most common reaction to this dilemma was just to ignore Hugh’s work.” Everett left the field and never published on quantum mechanics again.

Fortunately, the cold war created a market for game-theorists and modellers, who worked in military research to chart the possible outcomes of nuclear war. Here Everett found respect, having invented an ‘Everett algorithm’ to improve on the traditional Lagrange multiplier method for calculating consequences in logistics problems.

Starting in 1956, he worked for the Pentagon’s top-secret Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, devising nuclear strategies and estimating the lethal effects of fallout, and from 1964 worked for the Lambda Corporation, another military think tank. Years after its publication, Everett’s take on quantum mechanics was the subject of a 1970 article in Physics Today by theoretical physicist Bryce DeWitt, who named it the ‘many worlds’ interpretation.

The catchy phrase helped attract attention to the idea and made it acceptable to discuss. Science-fiction authors also took note. Before Everett’s dissertation, alternative worlds had featured in the fiction of H.G. Wells and Jorge Luis Borges, among others. Renewed scientific interest boosted the theory’s popularity in science fiction, where it features still.

Neal Stephenson’s novel Anathem (William Morrow, 2008) is a recent example that uses it as a plot device. Invariably, however, these portrayals cheat the physics by intersecting the branched worlds. Everett’s personal life was as erratic as his career.

1. Byrne describes him as a stubborn, overweight, chain-smoking alcoholic who ignored his children and mistreated his wife.
2. His objective function didn’t include emotional values,” says one friend.
3. According to another, “He looked at life as a game, and his object was to maximize fun,
4. He thought physics was fun.

He thought nuclear war was fun.” Or modelling it, anyway. At the end of his life, the near-bankrupt Everett was writing code for a software program to calculate mortgage payments in various scenarios. He died of a heart attack while drunk. As paramedics carried the corpse away, his son realized that he did not remember ever having touched his father in life.

1. Following Everett’s wishes, his widow threw out his cremated remains in the rubbish.
2. His daughter, who had schizophrenia and married an addict, became addicted to alcohol and drugs herself and later committed suicide.
3. The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III is short on critical analysis and slightly long on sordid details.

There is much championing of Everett and his theories. Byrne’s opinions can be heavy-handed, and he casts Bohr and Wheeler as villains. He strains hard to find meaning, proposing that the story of Everett’s flamboyant mother Katherine, a pulp-fiction writer with manic depression, “captures the difficulty of being a self-reliant woman in mid 20th century America”, and that Everett’s life “reflects America’s collective personality during the Cold War and beyond”.

• Byrne does not clearly explain why most scientists find Everett’s interpretation to be over the top.
• It’s an extravagant violation of Occam’s Razor,” as one of my physicist colleagues puts it.
• Why postulate uncountable infinities of unknowable, branching universes to address a problem for which there are solutions that prune the branches? Everett’s idea is merely an interpretation; it fails to make predictions and cannot be falsified.

The many worlds theory is still garish after all these years. Nevertheless, it is fascinating to read the story of its creator, himself too obsessed with models to intersect effectively with the real world.

Are we in Earth 1218?

History – Earth-1218 is the designation given to our reality, where super-heroes and other super-powered beings don’t physically exist. This universe may appear somewhat dull from a cerebral perspective, but it does have its good sides, for those willing to recognize them.

In this world, all characters from other realities are considered fictional and are currently owned by Marvel Comics, The first of these characters, Namor, the Sub-Mariner, appeared in a comic book entitled Motion Picture Funnies Weekly published in April 1939, followed soon after by the first issue of Marvel Comics, which would later provide the name of the publisher initially known as Timely Comics,

Although numerous characters associated with Marvel would rise to popularity in the 1940s, the so-called “golden age” of Marvel (a.k.a. “Age of Heroes”) is said to have truly begun with the publication of Fantastic Four #1 in 1961. Some of the Multiverse’s residents attempt to break the fourth wall and communicate with Earth-1218, most notably Deadpool and She-Hulk,

What universe is 2099?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Marvel 2099 is a Marvel Comics imprint, started in 1992, that was originally one possible future of the Marvel Universe, but later revealed in a climax of Superior Spider-Man Goblin Nation arc and Amazing Spider-Man Vol.3 #14 to be the Earth of the prime Marvel continuity in the distant future.

It was originally announced by Stan Lee in his ” Stan’s Soapbox ” column as a single series entitled The Marvel World of Tomorrow, which was being developed by Lee and John Byrne, This later changed to a line of books under the banner Marvel 2093 (the date being one hundred years from the year in which the titles launched) before finally being published as Marvel 2099,

Three of the initial four titles launched— Doom 2099, Punisher 2099, and Spider-Man 2099 —starred futuristic takes on pre-existing characters. The fourth, Ravage 2099, featured an all-new superhero, scripted for several months by Stan Lee, The 2099 line soon expanded to include 2099 Unlimited, Fantastic Four 2099, Ghost Rider 2099, Hulk 2099, X-Men 2099, and X-Nation 2099,

Are we connected to the universe?

Humans in a Vast Universe: Astronomy and Cosmic Significance (transcripción en español, aquí abajo) Dr. Jennifer Wiseman: We now have evidence from many directions that the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, beginning with an enormously spectacular burst of energy.

1. And that energy transforming over time into a mix of matter and energy, and that matter becoming atoms, gas, stars, and galaxies.
2. And then within these galaxies, generations of stars producing heavier elements, those heavier elements enabled the formation of planets around stars.
3. And then on at least one planet, we have life.

We are very intimately connected with the rest of the universe in a very practical way. Our bodies actually do contain atoms that were forged in stars. In fact, most of the elements that we are familiar with, we don’t know how to create them originally other than in stars.

• So, it’s not us here and the universe out there.
• We are all part of the same wonderful physical entity. Dr.
• David Charbonneau: Astronomy is an entirely observational science.
• What we do is we can listen to the universe, basically through our telescopes.
• We can gather light from distant objects.
• And through studying light, we’re able to puzzle out the properties of objects that we can never go to directly.

There are many astronomers who study light from 10 billion years ago, and basically we are allowed to look back in time through using our telescopes. So, telescopes are sort of like a time machine. Dr. Jennifer Wiseman: Everything we look at we are looking at it as it was when the light began its journey to us.

1. Astronomers use this wonderful time machine tool to help us understand how the universe has matured from a burst of energy to a place teeming with galaxies, stars, and planets. Br.
2. Guy Consolmagno: The early solar system was a very violent place where planets were being formed and broken up constantly.

We know that the planets form from a cloud of gas and dust. Dr. Jennifer Wiseman: Where does this dust and gas come from? So, stars themselves are little factories that start with mostly hydrogen collapsed into a dense clump of gas. And then that pressure creates a fusion reaction in the core of stars that can result in the production of heavier elements.

Then when stars die, they actually release all of that material they’ve created into the interstellar medium, and the next generation of stars incorporates some of that richer material. So you have generations of stars that create heavier and heavier elements. All of this has served over the 13.8 billion-year history of the universe to enrich galaxies with more and more varieties of elements that we now enjoy on places like planet Earth.

Dr. David Charbonneau: The distances between things in our own solar system is tiny compared to the distances between different solar systems. Br. Guy Consolmagno: If you go to a football field and you have a beach ball at the goal line, at about the 30 yard line, there will be a pebble.

That’s the earth. At the other goal line is maybe a golf ball, that’s Jupiter. If you travel from there to the other side of the earth, from America to Russia, that distance would be one light year. And the nearest star is four and a half light years away. And that’s our nearest star. Dr. Jennifer Wiseman: We also see that the universe is still expanding.

Br. Guy Consolmagno: Space between galaxy clusters is growing. It’s not that these galaxies are going out into empty space, but the space itself is actually expanding. Dr. Jennifer Wiseman: So, we don’t really know a crisp answer to how big the universe is.

We know its age, and we know it’s enormous. And we know the content of the universe is enormous. In the visible universe, there are something like 400 billion galaxies, and each galaxy can have hundreds of billions of stars. So, it’s mindboggling. Dr. Jennifer Wiseman: As we are realizing more and more the enormous size and scale of the universe and its enormously rich content, it begs the question of whether there could be life outside our own solar system.

Dr. David Charbonneau: If you had asked me 10 years ago how common are small, rocky planets like the Earth, I would have said we really had no idea. Humans have been asking that question for hundreds, arguably thousands of years. What’s so exciting is that we are the first generation in human history that actually can answer that question.

1. An exoplanet is a planet that orbits another star, and we really didn’t know anything about exoplanets about 20 years ago and that situation has changed dramatically. Br.
2. Guy Consolmagno: In the last ten years, we had something called the Kepler Space Telescope which allowed us to focus on one particular part of the Milky Way.

Very, very narrow field, but study it very intently. Dr. David Charbonneau: At this point, astronomers have found about 5,000 planets orbiting many different stars throughout the galaxy. Dr. Jennifer Wiseman: Because of all these planets, there’s a lot of speculation that life might be common.

Why should Earth be the only place where there’s life? So, it certainly seems in some sense just by the statistics that life could be very common, at least simple life. Dr. David Charbonneau: An active, current question is what is the minimum set of things you need to measure to really conclude that the only explanation is life? And it may be that there’s other molecules, such as methane, directly seeing that there are liquid oceans, maybe seeing the green, the photosynthetic color.

But is that enough? Will we ever be able to make a conclusive statement that we really know that there’s life on another planet? I do think in the next even 10 years, it’s possible we’re going to answer that question. Dr. Jennifer Wiseman: And of course, these are just the scientific questions.

• There are the bigger philosophical questions of why capital W, why is life existing and is there purpose in it? Those are the kinds of questions beyond the tools of our microscopes and telescopes, but this type of science does beg all these interesting types of questions.
• Astronauts have commented on looking back at Earth from space.

It gives them an entirely new perspective when they see all of humanity in one unified space. I think you can have a similar reorienting experience looking the other direction. Looking out in the larger cosmos and realizing that we are a tiny part of an extraordinary system.

How many possible parallel universes are there?

You’ve likely imagined it before: another Universe out there, just like this one, where all the random events and chances that brought about our reality exactly as it is played out just the same. In every way, every quantum event that had a set of possibilities as to which outcomes could have occurred, have played out identically in that other Universe to the one we inhabit today.

Except, that is, until right now, when you made one fateful decision in this Universe, you took an alternate path in that other Universe. These two Universes, which ran parallel to one another for so long, suddenly diverged. Perhaps our Universe, with the version of events we’re familiar with, isn’t the only one out there.

Perhaps there are other Universes, perhaps even with different versions of ourselves, different histories and alternate outcomes from what we’ve experienced. This isn’t merely fiction — although it plays an incredible role in a variety of fictional settings — but one of the most exciting possibilities brought about through theoretical physics. This artist’s conception shows a logarithmic view of the observable Universe. The Solar System gives way to the Milky Way, which gives way to nearby galaxies which then give way to the large-scale structure and the hot, dense plasma of the Big Bang at the outskirts.

Each line-of-sight that we can observe contains all of these epochs, but the quest for the most distant observed object will not be complete until we’ve mapped out the entire Universe. With each passing new year, another few tens of thousands of galaxies potentially become visible. ( Credit : Pablo Carlos Budassi) As vast as our Universe might be, the part that we can see, access, affect, or be affected by is finite and quantifiable.

Including photons and neutrinos, it contains some 10 90 particles, clumped and clustered together into approximately 6-to-20 trillion galaxies, with perhaps another 9-to-30 trillion galaxies that will reveal themselves to us as the Universe continues to expand.

Each such galaxy comes with around a trillion stars inside it (on average), and these galaxies clump together in an enormous, cosmos-spanning web that extends for 46 billion light-years away from us in all directions. But, despite what our intuition might tell us, that doesn’t mean we’re at the center of a finite Universe.

In fact, the full suite of evidence indicates something quite to the contrary. The reason the Universe appears finite in size to us — the reason we can’t see anything that’s more than a specific distance away — isn’t because the Universe is actually finite in size, but is rather because the Universe has only existed in its present state for a finite amount of time. If you look farther and farther away, you also look farther and farther into the past. If the number of galaxies, the densities and properties of those galaxies, and other cosmic properties like the temperature and expansion rate of the Universe didn’t appear to change, you’d have evidence of a Universe that was constant in time.

( Credit : NASA/ESA/A. Feild (STScI)) If you learn nothing else about the Big Bang, it should be this: the Universe was not constant in space or in time, but rather has evolved from a more uniform, hotter, denser state to a clumpier, cooler, and more diffuse state today. As we go to earlier and earlier times, the Universe appears smoother and with fewer, less-evolved galaxies; as we look to later times, the galaxies are larger and more massive, consisting of older stars, with greater distances separating galaxies, groups, and clusters from one another.

This has given us a rich Universe, containing many relics from our shared cosmic history, including:

• many generations of stars,
• an ultra-cold background of leftover radiation,
• galaxies that appear to recede away from us ever-more-rapidly the more distant they are,
• with a fundamental limit to how far back we can see.

The limit to our cosmic perspective is set by the distance that light has had the ability to travel since the moment of the Big Bang. But this in no way means that there isn’t more Universe out there beyond the portion that’s accessible to us. In fact, there’s both observational and theoretical arguments that point to the existence of much more Universe beyond what we see: perhaps even infinitely more. The observable Universe might be 46 billion light-years in all directions from our point of view, but there’s certainly more, unobservable Universe, perhaps even an infinite amount, just like ours beyond that. Over time, we’ll be able to see more of it, eventually revealing approximately 2.3 times as many galaxies as we can presently view.

Even for the parts we never see, there are things we’ll want to know about them. Gathering as much information as possible is vital toward the endeavor. ( Credit : Frederic Michel and Andrew Z. Colvin/Wikimedia Commons; annotations by E. Siegel) A finite Universe would display a number of telltale signals that enable us to determine that we don’t live in an infinite sea of spacetime.

We’d measure our spatial curvature, and could find that the Universe was shaped like a sphere in some way, where if you traveled in a straight line for long enough, you’d return to your starting point. You could look for repeating patterns in the sky, where the same object appeared in different locations simultaneously. The appearance of different angular sizes of fluctuations in the CMB results in different spatial curvature scenarios. Presently, the Universe appears to be flat, but we have only measured down to about the 0.4% level. At a more precise level, we may discover some level of intrinsic curvature, after all, but what we’ve observed is enough to tell us that if the Universe is curved, it’s only curved on scales that are ~(250)³ times (or more than 15 million times) larger than our presently-observable Universe is.

• Credit : Smoot Cosmology Group/LBL) Of course, we can’t know that for certain.
• If all you had access to was your own backyard, you couldn’t measure the curvature of the Earth, because the portion you had access to was indistinguishable from flat.
• Based on the portion of the Universe we see, we can state that if the Universe is finite and does curve back on itself, it must have at least millions of times the volume of the portion we can see, with no upper limit to that figure.

But theoretically, the implications of our observations paint a picture that’s even more tantalizing. You see, we can extrapolate the Big Bang backward to an arbitrarily hot, dense, expanding state, and find that it couldn’t have gotten infinitely hot and dense early on. This diagram shows, to scale, how spacetime evolves/expands in equal time increments if your Universe is dominated by matter, radiation, or the energy inherent to space itself (i.e., during inflation or dark energy dominance), with the latter corresponding to the inflationary phase that preceded and set up the hot Big Bang.

1. Although all of these model universes expand toward infinite size, they approach it at different rates, with the “space itself” solution approaching infinity in a fundamentally more quick fashion than the other two.
2. Credit : E.
3. Siegel/Beyond the Galaxy In a Universe filled with matter or radiation, the expansion rate will decrease over time, as the Universe becomes less dense.

But if the energy in inherent to space itself, the density will not drop, but rather remains constant, even as the Universe expands. In a matter or radiation dominated Universe, the expansion rate slows as time goes on, and distant points recede from one another at ever slower speeds.

• But with exponential expansion, the rate doesn’t drop at all, and distant locations — as time goes on incrementally — get twice as far away, then four times, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, etc.
• Because the expansion is not just exponential but also incredibly rapid, “doubling” happens on timescale of around 10 -35 seconds.

This implies:

• by the time 10 -34 seconds have passed, the Universe is around 10 3 (or 1000) times its initial size,
• by the time 10 -33 seconds have passed, the Universe is around 10 30 (or 1000 10 ) times its initial size,
• by the time 10 -32 seconds have passed, the Universe is around 10 300 (or 1000 100 ) times its initial size,

and so on. Exponential isn’t so powerful because it’s fast; it’s powerful because it’s relentless. Now, obviously the Universe didn’t continue to expand in this fashion forever, because we’re here. Inflation occurred for some amount of time in the past, but then ended, setting up the Big Bang. Inflation ends (top) when a ball rolls into the valley. But the inflationary field is a quantum one (middle), spreading out over time. While many regions of space (purple, red and cyan) will see inflation end, many more (green, blue) will see inflation continue, potentially for an eternity (bottom).

1. The quantum nature of inflation means that it ends in some “pockets” of the Universe and continues in others.
2. Credit : E.
3. Siegel/Beyond the Galaxy) One useful way to think about inflation is like a ball rolling very slowly down from the top of a very flat hill, as shown in the top panel, above.
4. As long as the ball remains near the topmost plateau, it rolls slowly and inflation continues, causing the Universe to expand exponentially.

Once the ball reaches the edge and rolls down into the valley, however, inflation ends. As it oscillates back-and-forth in the valley, that rolling behavior causes the energy from inflation to dissipate, converting it into matter-and-radiation, ending the inflationary state and beginning the hot Big Bang.

1. Inflation isn’t like a ball — which is a classical field — but is rather like a wave that spreads out over time, like a quantum field.
2. As time goes on and more-and-more space gets created due to inflation, certain regions, probabilistically, are going to be more likely to see inflation come to an end, while others will be more likely to see inflation continue.
3. The regions where inflation ends will give rise to a Big Bang and a Universe like ours, while the regions where it doesn’t will continue to inflate for longer.
4. As time goes on, because of the dynamics of expansion, no two regions where inflation ends will ever interact or collide; the regions where inflation doesn’t end will expand between them, pushing these “bubble Universes” apart from one another.

A representation of the different parallel “worlds” that might exist in other pockets of the multiverse. As time goes on, more and more possibilities must arise, meaning that the number of Universes that must exist to contain them all must rise as well, at least as quickly, or no two universes will ever be identical. Travel the Universe with astrophysicist Ethan Siegel. Subscribers will get the newsletter every Saturday. All aboard! We don’t know if the regions where inflation ended are all the same as one another, with the same laws of nature, fundamental constants, and quantum properties and fluctuations as our own Universe. The Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics holds that there are an infinite number of parallel universes that exist, holding all possible outcomes of a quantum mechanical system, and that making an observation simply chooses one path. This interpretation is philosophically interesting, but has no physical meaning if there isn’t enough “universe” out there to physically hold all of these possibilities within it.

• Where you chose the job overseas instead of the one that kept you in your country?
• Where you stood up to the bully instead of letting yourself be taken advantage of?
• Where you kissed the one-who-got-away at the end of the night, instead of letting them go?
• And where the life-or-death event that you or your loved one faced at some point in the past had a different outcome?

Maybe. It’s certainly wishful thinking to believe so. But for that to actually be our physical reality, those unknowns about our Universe need to have specific answers that may not be very likely. The multiverse idea states that there are very large numbers of Universes like our own out there, and others whose properties might have extreme, fundamental differences. But in order for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics to be physically real, there must be a place (i.e., a real Universe) for these parallel outcomes to reside in, and unless inflation occurred for an infinite amount of time, the math doesn’t work out right to contain them.

Credit : Lee Davy/flickr/cc by 2.0 First off, the inflationary state that preceded the Big Bang must have lasted for not just a long time, but a truly infinite amount of time. Let’s assume that the Universe inflated — i.e., expanded exponentially — for 13.8 billion years. That would create enough volume of space for 10^(10 50 ) Universes just like our own, or 10 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 Universes.

That is, no doubt, truly a gargantuan number. But it’s still a finite number, and if it’s not bigger than the number of possible outcomes, it isn’t big enough to contain the possibilities that the notion of parallel Universes would necessitate. So let’s think about quantifying the number of possible outcomes.

• There are ~10 90 particles in our Universe, including photons and neutrinos, and we require that every one of them have the same history of interactions since the Big Bang that they experienced here to duplicate our Universe.
• We can quantify the odds by taking 10 90 particles and giving them 13.8 billion years to interact.

We then have to ask how many possible outcomes there are given the laws of quantum physics and the rate of particle interactions. As large as a double exponential is — as 10^(10 50 ) is — it’s far smaller than our estimate for the number of possible quantum outcomes for 10 90 particles, which is somewhat larger (10 90 )! That ! stands for factorial, where 5! is 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 *1 = 120, but 1000! is 1000 * 999 * 998 * * 3 * 2 * 1 and is a 2477-digit number. Bubble chamber tracks from Fermilab, revealing the charge, mass, energy and momentum of the particles created. Although there are only a few dozen particles whose tracks are shown here, there are already an astronomically large number of possible outcomes that could have resulted from the interactions of the particles shown here over the fraction-of-a-second that their interactions were recorded.

1. The number of possible quantum outcomes rises much faster, in any system, than we’re used to from large numbers.
2. Credit : Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory/DOE/NSF It’s true: both numbers go to infinity.
3. The number of possible parallel Universes tends to infinity, but does so at a particular (exponential) rate, but the number of possible quantum outcomes for a Universe like ours also tends to infinity, and does so much more quickly.

As both mathematicians and John Green fans know, some infinities are bigger than others, What this means is that, unless inflation has been occurring for a truly infinite amount of time, there are no parallel Universes out there identical to this one. While many independent Universes are predicted to be created in an inflating spacetime, inflation never ends everywhere at once, but rather only in distinct, independent areas separated by space that continues to inflate. This is where the scientific motivation for a Multiverse comes from, and why no two Universes will ever collide.

The Universe doesn’t expand into anything; it itself is expanding. Credit : Ozytive/Public Domain Although we cannot prove whether inflation went on for an infinite duration or not, there is a theorem that demonstrates that inflationary spacetimes cannot be extrapolated back for arbitrary amounts of time; they have no beginning if so, and are called past-timelike-incomplete,

Inflation may give us an enormously huge number of Universes that reside within a greater multiverse, but there simply aren’t enough of them to create an alternate, parallel you. The number of possible outcomes simply increases too fast for even an inflationary Universe to contain them all.

In all the multiverse, there is likely only one you. You must make this Universe count, as there is no alternate version of you. Take the dream job. Stand up for yourself. Navigate through the difficulties with no regrets, and go all-out every day of your life. There is no other Universe where this version of you exists, and no future awaiting you other than the one you live into reality.

Make it count.

Is there a multiverse in Islam?

The Islamic View of the Multiverse I t wasn’t Einstein or even astronomer Edwin Hubble who came up with the Big Bang theory, but Georges Lemaître, a Belgian astrophysicist and Roman Catholic priest. Whereas Einstein and most of his contemporaries assumed the universe was static and eternal, Lemaître derived new solutions to Einstein’s relativity theory that indicated an expanding universe.

Imagining what must have set the expansion in motion, he developed his evocative image of “the Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of the creation.” With his theory, Lemaître brought a millennia-old philosophical question—whether the universe is eternal or finite—into the domain of empirical science.

To Jamal Mimouni, an astrophysicist at Algeria’s Mentouri University, Lemaître’s work is a demonstration of the value a religious worldview offers in tackling such questions. “Although Lemaître always stated that he kept his beliefs and science separate, his faith might have inspired him to consider ideas that others didn’t,” he says.

“Many others were blinded by their adherence to the philosophy that the universe is eternal, but he didn’t have that problem.” By providing a diversity of viewpoints, researchers with an explicitly religious perspective can help push cosmology in new directions. The multiverse attracts adherents because of its philosophical appeal, not its scientific rigor.

At the boundaries of our knowledge, where physics meets metaphysics, lie questions which are beyond scientific reach, at least for the moment. As cosmologists push at these boundaries, they derive answers, consciously or unconsciously, from philosophical preferences.

1. Mimouni and other devout Muslim scientists find that the need to articulate metaphysical presumptions is often more apparent to them than to their colleagues.
2. In my view, the only problem with modern cosmology is that some cosmologists consider their findings final and make claims in the name of science, when these are actually metaphysical claims,” says Mehdi Golshani, a theoretical physicist and philosopher at Iran’s Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, the country’s leading research university.

“The problem of creation is not a matter of physics alone.” Addressing the leading scientific questions of our age calls for a profound understanding not only of the science, but also of the philosophy of science, whether rooted in a theistic or a secular personal ideology.

1. G olshani has sought such understanding from an early age.
2. When I was in high school, one of my teachers encouraged me to study Arabic and Islamic jurisprudence and Islamic philosophy outside of school,” he recalls.
3. He studied physics at Tehran University and later at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1995 he established Iran’s first philosophy of science department at Sharif.

An area where cosmology intersects with philosophy is the suitability of the universe for life, a fact which we now think is an overwhelmingly unlikely coincidence. Small changes to any of a number of fundamental physical constants would have resulted in a radically different universe, presumably inhospitable to life as we know it.

This apparent coincidence led to the formulation of the anthropic principle, which, in its most general form, simply notes that the values of physical parameters should be compatible with carbon-based life; stronger forms elevate this observation to a necessary condition for the universe, akin to the classical design argument.

Faced with the prospect of a universe seemingly designed to support life, many strict materialists have turned to multiverse theories. Multiple universes are predicted by a variety of physical theories, including certain inflationary universe models, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and string theory.

1. With countless universes of diverse composition, the remarkable coincidence dissolves into a selection bias.
2. Rather than living in a universe finely tuned to produce us, we simply evolved in an appropriately tuned universe, while many sterile universes litter the multiverse.
3. Although multiverse theories may explain the universe’s suitability for life, the idea lacks empirical support and is arguably motivated by metaphysical discomfort with the alternatives.

“Scientists who defend this hypothesis, and who at present represent a majority in the community, do it as much on the basis of a philosophical rejection of the anthropic principle as on the basis of some cosmological principles which lend it support,” wrote astrophysicist Nidhal Guessoum of the American University of Sharjah in his recent book Islam’s Quantum Question,

Located at the seam of physics and metaphysics, multiverse hypotheses attract adherents because of their philosophical appeal, not their scientific rigor. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. or, From the Muslim perspective, cosmological fine-tuning isn’t a problem, From a broader perspective, the multiverse is one of several possible explanations, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.

While the idea of a multiverse is also compatible with an Islamic worldview, many Muslims find a theological interpretation of fine-tuning more compelling. To them the remarkable coincidence is just another facet of the argument from design, which has a long pedigree in Islamic thought.

• The ninth-century philosopher Al-Kindi was the first Muslim thinker to formulate the argument, while Ibn Rushd’s Kitab al-Kashf, written in the 12th century, put it forth in nearly the same form that would be used by William Paley six centuries later.
• From the Muslim perspective, fine-tuning isn’t a problem, but rather an example of the beauty and order of the cosmos.

Multiverse proposals seem to willfully undermine this beauty, positing a plethora of universes to account for the observed characteristics of our universe. To Mimouni, the idea is also unscientific. “From an ontological point of view, it’s a catastrophe, because you’re proposing things you can never observe, universes that are causally disconnected from our universe,” he says.

1. In fact, it’s against the philosophy of science as we understand it because it talks about entities that can never be studied or have their existence proven.” M imouni raises similar objections to scientific explanations of creation from nothing.
2. In the 1970s and ’80s, cosmologists such as Edward Tryon and Alex Vilenkin suggested that the universe may have come into existence because of a quantum fluctuation, but Mimouni argues that these models are based on a misapplication of quantum mechanics to a domain beyond its scope.

More importantly, physical theories of creation ex nihilo are not strictly ex nihilo because the laws of nature are assumed to precede the universe. “If you say ‘from nothing’ but that doesn’t include the laws of the universe, then that’s not really ‘nothing’,” he says.

“It’s deeply philosophically and scientifically problematic. Basically, it’s an attempt to make a kun fayakun without a deity.” Basil Altaie, an Iraqi physicist and philosopher at Yarmouk University in Jordan, goes one step further, seeing the Qur’an as a guide for scientific inquiries. Uncomfortable with the contradiction between the prevalent idea of an ever-expanding universe and Qur’anic eschatology, which describes the heavens being rolled up like a scroll, he has reworked solutions to Einstein’s equations starting with different assumptions.

“We found a possibility for a flat universe to go through a collapse phase, a Big Crunch, before bouncing back to a new creation,” he says. Such a fate would be consistent with Qur’anic verses. Altaie has also drawn on Islamic thought to address the notoriously contentious issue of interpreting quantum mechanics.

• According to a principle championed by the 11th-century Muslim theologian Al-Ghazali, the world is re-created every instant in a continuous act of divine intervention.
• To Altaie, continuous re-creation offers a novel interpretation of quantum mechanics.
• The moment-by-moment re-creation can unpredictably alter the values of physical parameters such as position and momentum, thus explaining both quantum indeterminism and uncertainty.

Unlike most interpretations of quantum mechanics, Altaie’s makes a testable prediction: that gravitational time dilation described by general relativity would reduce the frequency of re-creation, so macroscopic quantum states should be detectable in strong gravitational fields, such as near the event horizon of a black hole.

• Although some might deny it, all scientists approach research with their own preconceptions guiding the questions they ask and the interpretations they construct.
• As cosmology tackles ever-grander questions, a broader perspective can be found by informed dialogue between researchers with theistic and secular viewpoints.

“Any question can be resolved in different ways, starting from different perspectives and explaining the same data,” says Mimouni, echoing the arguments of Ibn Rushd. “Experiments are the ultimate test, but they don’t show that a given perspective is the only valid one, just that it’s just one way of reaching the truth.

Sedeer El-Showk is a science writer based in Morocco and Finland. @InspiringSci

Cutting-edge science, unraveled by the very brightest living thinkers. : The Islamic View of the Multiverse

Can there be multiple parallel universes?

Our universe might be really, really big — but finite. Or it might be infinitely big. Both cases, says physicist Brian Greene, are possibilities, but if the latter is true, so is another posit: There are only so many ways matter can arrange itself within that infinite universe.

1. Eventually, matter has to repeat itself and arrange itself in similar ways.
2. So if the universe is infinitely large, it is also home to infinite parallel universes.
3. Does that sound confusing? Try this: Think of the universe like a deck of cards.
4. Now, if you shuffle that deck, there’s just so many orderings that can happen,” Greene says.

“If you shuffle that deck enough times, the orders will have to repeat. Similarly, with an infinite universe and only a finite number of complexions of matter, the way in which matter arranges itself has to repeat.” Greene, the author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos, tackles the existence of multiple universes in his latest book, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos,

Recent discoveries in physics and astronomy, he says, point to the idea that our universe may be one of many universes populating a grander multiverse. “You almost can’t avoid having some version of the multiverse in your studies if you push deeply enough in the mathematical descriptions of the physical universe,” he says.

“There are many of us thinking of one version of parallel universe theory or another. If it’s all a lot of nonsense, then it’s a lot of wasted effort going into this far-out idea. But if this idea is correct, it is a fantastic upheaval in our understanding.” How Quantum Mechanics And General Relativity Play A Part Greene thinks the key to understanding these multiverses comes from string theory, the area of physics he has studied for the past 25 years. In a nutshell, string theory attempts to reconcile a mathematical conflict between two already accepted ideas in physics: quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity.