What's Better Than Finding Aliens? Finding Other Universes
Posted by Michael_Byrne on Monday, Dec 13, 2010
A team of astronomers at London’s University College think they’ve done just that: found evidence of other universes, whole other realms that might have radically different physical laws and where dogs meow and cats front mysterious-cat hardcore bands.
Remember those weird circles Roger Penrose and co. found last month (or announced last month, anyhow) in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation? It’s a pretty remarkable find: possibly “fossils” of a pre-this universe universe in the form of imprints in the CMB. (Though, other teams have since disputed the Penrose findings.)
In any case, the University College team has determined another possibility for that weirdness in the CMB: bruises.
Meaning, we may have detected impact zones between our universe and four others. It has to do with a different perspective of how the universe—and beyond—behaves. Penrose and co. are thinking that it bangs and shrinks and bangs and shrinks an infinite number of times. It’s not among the more accepted theories.
This London group, as detailed in a new paper, is going from the perspective of the eternal, or inflationary, universe, which starts from a bang and just keeps going and everything dies and goes dark, and we live for eternity in a universe of absolute nothing. There is still stuff in that universe forever, but without energy, it’s pretty null; eternal, but a rather cold and dark sort of eternal. (There’s also a theory that in this universe, time just eventually stops altogether.)
So in this universe that expands forever and eventually burns out there’s a period right after the Big Bang of really intense inflation where everything is expanding and cooling at different rates (dictated by quantum fluctuations maybe, but that’s for another time). Those differences translate into basically small bubbles in the expansion of the universe that break off into their own universe. We’re one of these bubbles in a near-endless supply.
And, apparently, we bumped into four others.
So, what now? Who’s right? No one really. Until we get better data from the Plank spacecraft, which is taking better pictures of the CMB as we speak, all of this is just speculation. Which doesn’t make it less juicy.
Related:
So, Maybe There Wasn’t A Big Bang?
OK, So Maybe Cosmology Was Wrong
Reach this dreamer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
Image: screen-grab from the above mentioned paper.Filed under:
About the author
Michael covers physics, climate science, the future of music, and assorted things fallen through cracks at Motherboard. A native of Colorado, Michigan, and Oregon, he currently resides in Baltimore...
