Big Bang Discovery Opens Door to the Multiverse. Excerpt:
Gravitational waves rippling through the aftermath of the cosmic fireball, physicists suggest, point to us inhabiting a multiverse, a universe filled with many universes. (See: “Big Bang’s ‘Smoking Gun’ Confirms Early Universe’s Exponential Growth.”)
That’s because those gravitational wave results point to a particularly prolific and potent kind of “inflation” of the early universe, an exponential expansion of the dimensions of space to many times the size of our own cosmos in the first fraction of a second of the Big Bang, some 13.82 billion years ago.
“In most models, if you have inflation, then you have a multiverse,” said Stanford physicist Andrei Linde. Linde, one of cosmological inflation’s inventors, spoke on Monday at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics event where the BICEP2 astrophysics team unveiled the gravitational wave results.
I have to admit that it’s hard to wrap the old brain pan around these kinds of concepts, unless you are a theoretical physicist. But imagine if you will the idea of a gazillion or so alternate universes – if the number is large enough, would some of those be similar enough to ours to allow other sentient life to evolve?
For a fun if somewhat long-winded look at this idea, take a browse through Robert Heinlein’s Number of the Beast. The two heroes and two heroines of that piece take a romp through just such a multiverse, using an interdimensional ship that can travel though all the universes – that number being not six hundred and sixty-six, as the title suggests, but rather six to the sixth power to the sixth power. They discover that each universe is the product of a work of fiction from ours, or rather, than each universe somehow generated a corresponding work of fiction. They visit Barsoom, and Oz, and the Lensman’s universe, and a bunch more – before running into the inevitable Lazarus Long in a dragged-out and somewhat predictable ending, which was the bane of Heinlein’s later works.
It’s still worth the read.
