by Lauren Tam
In hearing the word “multiverse”, we usually think of Doctor Strange or the Flash. We all wish we could travel through time and space, or be the fastest person alive – I know I do. Though interdimensional life tends to stay on screen, there is reason to believe that it can be reality. We might not be alone in our universe.
What is the Multiverse?
The multiverse is an unimaginably huge ocean of universes. It is the idea of a vast array of potential universes. The multiverse may be a controversial idea, but it has a very simple concept.
Erick Weinberg, a physicist at Columbia University, compares the multiverse to a boiling cauldron. Imagine that the bubbles represent individual universes – isolated pockets of space-time. As the pot boils, the bubbles expand and sometimes collide. A similar process may have occurred in the first moments of the cosmos, or the Big Bang’s afterglow.
Bubble Universes
This theory is most commonly believed amongst scientists. This potential reason is from a theory called eternal inflation. Often, this is the notion that the universe expanded rapidly after the Big Bang, therefore inflating like a balloon. The theory was first proposed by Tufts University cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin. It suggests that some pockets of space stop inflating, while other regions continue to inflate, give rise to many isolated “bubble universes”. Our universe stopped inflating, and this made way for stars and galaxies to form.
A study suggests that if our universe has siblings, we may have bumped into them. Such collisions would have left lasting marks in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, the diffuse light left over from the Big Bang that permeates the universe. Additionally, if two universes had collided, researchers say, it would have left a circular pattern behind in the cosmic microwave background.
Parallel Universes
This comes from string theory. It predicts a large number of universes, maybe 10 to 500 or more, all with slightly different physical parameters. These are called “braneworlds“, parallel universes that hover just out of reach of our own. There is the possibility of many more dimensions to our world than the three of space and one of time that we understand. In addition to our own three-dimensional “brane” of space, other three-dimensional branes may float in a higher-dimensional space. An additional crease in this theory suggests these brane universes are not always parallel and out of reach. Sometimes, they may crash into each other, causing repeated Big Bangs that reset the universes over and over again.
These are merely two reasons for the existence of the multiverse; there are many more. I believe it is worth researching and discovering the possibility of life in otherwordly-dimensions. In any case, finding other worlds would further open up the question: Are we truly alone in the universe?
Wow