'Multiverse' theory suggested by microwave background

[The Straight Story]

The idea that other universes - as well as our own - lie within "bubbles" of space and time has received a boost.

Studies of the low-temperature glow left from the Big Bang suggest that several of these "bubble universes" may have left marks on our own.

This "multiverse" idea is popular in modern physics, but experimental tests have been hard to come by.

...

For now, the team has worked with seven years' worth of data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which measures in minute detail the cosmic microwave background (CMB) - the faint glow left from our Universe's formation.

'Mind-blowing'
The theory that invokes these bubble universes - a theory formally called "eternal inflation" - holds that such universes are popping into and out of existence and colliding all the time, with the space between them rapidly expanding - meaning that they are forever out of reach of one another.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14372387

[flamingdem]

1. cool about those bubbles

can't wait to meet the bubble people

[ananda]

2. Wow.

That's fantastic!

[ret5hd]

3. How do universes (or anything else) both collide and have the space between them rapidly expand?

[ananda]

6. My imagination pictures it like a couple of balloons colliding and moving apart.

nt

[EOTE]

7. I believe "Brane Theory" can explain a bit of that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Membrane_%28M-theory%29

Of course, this is WELL beyond my comprehension. My understanding of it is that our universe could be thought of as something akin to a 2-dimensional membrane floating very near by other "branes". The "beginnings" of a particular universe could be thought of as when these branes collide and then move past each other. This stuff is so beyond me, but it intrigues the hell out of me.

[malmapus]

12. Agreed, there was an episode of Through the Wormhole that touched on that.

Blew my mind, really love this stuff.

[pipi_k]

14. Yeah, I love that series... :) n/t

[EOTE]

15. That is a fantastic show.

And Morgan Freeman is perfectly suited to it. There's something about his calm baritone which makes these insane concepts a little easier to comprehend. It's really just about the only show of its kind and really deserves some recognition for its quality and consistency.

[tridim]

13. The "space" in each bubble isn't the same space.

Try to think about it without constraining yourself to just our universe's observable 3D space.

[cyberpj]

31. From the article:

"They're born close together - that's when the collision happens - and this same inflation happens between the bubbles. They're being hurled apart and space-time is expanding faster than light between them."

[Saphire]

4. I'm fascinated by the subject, but I still have

a hard time understanding it.

[Skidmore]

8. Me too, and I often wonder if the people who study this stuff can

really visualize the theories they propound. I have a hard time picturing what such scenarios would look like although I would gladly love to pop into another universe right now.

[pipi_k]

16. I think most of them can...

and some of them are even able to explain this stuff in terms the average person can understand.

Carl Sagan was real good at it.


:)

[glinda]

9. I have always thought of it as related to "Sychronicity" actually.

[RKP5637]

5. K&R !!! n/t

[tridim]

10. I still think black holes are the seeds.

The fact that a black hole singularity equals zero (zero point space) means, at least to me, that it can exist as a single entity across the entire multiverse, just like elementary particles. Just give it some energy (like a galaxy of stars) and it blows a universe bubble within the space between the singularity and the event horizon.

Boggles.

[The Straight Story]

11. Black holes are vacuum cleaners from another universe

:)

[spinbaby]

18. What happens in the singularity...

...stays in the singularity.

[dtexdem]

17. But data from the new Planck telescope can't be discussed until January 2013.

And the world is ending in 2012 -- what a shame. ;-)

[DotGone]

19. I welcome our new Bubble Boy Overlords n/t

[tridim]

20. I'm sorry, it's Moopes.

[Permanut]

21. So, can the teabaggers please have their own bubble? n/t

[GliderGuider]

22. I never thought we'd be able to find physical evidence. Now what about life in them?

If the multiverse is real, other universes may contain "life". I put it in quotes, because it's probable that it would be so different from life here that we might not even recognize it as such.

What might life be like in a completely different universe, one whose structure is fundamentally unlike the one we live in? What characteristics might identify "life" in such a way that they could be considered universal?

[EOTE]

29. We'd probably never know.

From the article, it sounds like while we may find proof of the existence of the multiverse, it could be that we could never interact with it. That our universe is wholly separate from others and we information (other than the remnants of these bubbles) could never be transferred from one universe to the other.

[AngryAmish]

23. Lemmie fire up the ole bong and think about this for awhile

Dude, man, there are like, trillions of universes, man...think about it..man...

[cyberpj]

24. Cool. One of Dr. Sheldon Cooper's main theories just got a big boost with this!

BAZINGA!

[corpseratemedia]

25. lots of DUzys on this thread LOL

[deutsey]

26. Mr. Bubble is God

[MilesColtrane]

27. OK

So I look at the summary of the referred article mentioned in the bbc story.

The first sentence:

In the picture of eternal inflation, our observable universe resides inside a single bubble nucleated from an inflating false vacuum.

Hmm...I don't know what they mean by a "false vaccum".

So I look that up on Wiki:

In quantum field theory, a false vacuum is a metastable sector of space that appears to be a perturbative vacuum, but is unstable due to instanton effects that may tunnel to a lower energy state.

Pretty gnarly....but, I get the general gist, except for "instanton effects".

I'd better look that up. Back to Wiki for this:

An instanton is a notion appearing in theoretical and mathematical physics. Mathematically, a Yang–Mills instanton is a self-dual or anti-self-dual connection in a principal bundle over a four-dimensional Riemannian manifold that plays the role of physical space-time in nonabelian gauge theory. Instantons are topologically nontrivial solutions of Yang–Mills equations that absolutely minimize the energy functional within their topological type. The first such solutions were discovered in the case of four-dimensional Euclidean space compactified to the four-dimensional sphere, and turned out to be localized in space-time, prompting the names pseudoparticle and instanton.

At this point, I began hearing a high pitched whine, then a grinding noise, coming from inside my skull. Smoke started coming out of my ears, then a sharp pain as I sprained a frontal lobe.

I can no more understand this than a brain damaged chimp can pilot a nuclear aircraft carrier.

[EOTE]

28. You're not familiar with anti-self-dual connections as they pertain to 4D Riemannian manifolds?

Simpleton. :P

[On the Road]

30. I'm Still Trying to Figure it Out, Too

This is a little better:

instanton: A hypothetical pseudoparticle which provides solutions to equations describing the gauge fields of quantum chromodynamics, and represents large vacuum fluctuations in these fields that would exert forces on quarks.

http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Instantons

So it's a pseudoparticle which affects quarks and the forces associated with them.

The "pseudo" and "false vacuum" may have to do with the principle that a vacuum is constantly generating and reabsorbing opposite pairs of particles. Or maybe not. In any case, the instantons would seem to be potential or virtual particles arising from the properties of the vacuum of space.

That's about my limit. Anyone else care to chime in?

[Heywood J]

32. It's been a while and I'm going to mangle this for the purpose of explanation, so...

professional mathematicians, please forgive.


A manifold is an n-dimensional object which, when you look at it on a small enough scale, can be considered in fewer than n dimensions. A good way of explaining this is an example: when you drive to the store, you don't have to care that the Earth is, in fact, a sphere. You just drive on a two-dimensional street map without having to know that you're curving around the center of the Earth. There isn't enough error on that scale to throw off your navigation by any noticeable amount. Therefore, we can consider a sphere (in this case, the Earth) to be a manifold.

A manifold is basically a way of having hidden structure which, from a small scale, can't be seen. From our perspective, the universe could be a manifold if it has hidden dimensions that we can't perceive but, on our small scale, we don't currently need them for things to work the way we expect. A four dimensional manifold is a way of describing our view in space and time of a universe with at least five dimensions.



Think of a shape with n faces (sides) and m vertices (corners). The dual of a shape is the figure that comes about by drawing a line from the middle of each face, to the middle of each adjacent face. The dual of your shape would be the one with m faces and n vertices - you're exchanging the number of vertices for the number of faces, and vice-versa. For example, a cube has eight vertices (eight corners) and six faces. The dual of a cube is the figure with six vertices and eight faces (an octahedron - two square pyramids with bottoms against each other). Wiki's got a good image of this:

Self-dual shapes are ones with the same number of vertices and faces. Since you get the dual by swapping the vertex number and the face number, it converts to an identical shape. A simple example of a self-dual shape is a tetrahedron or a square pyramid. In this case, the dual of the square pyramid is an upside-down square pyramid. For an easy to grasp concept, it's like one way you could describe a mirror universe. The math concept quoted in the post above is working with a similar idea but, instead of shapes, it's being performed on spaces.

For the purpose of explanation, imagine a set of numbers, each one corresponding to the location of one of the vertices of a pyramid. When grouped together, we can call this set of numbers a vector that describes the pyramid. The idea of being anti-self-dual is one where the dual is like taking the negative of this vector. It's like producing a similar shape, but with a different direction. (This is an oversimplification, but it helps get the idea across)



The principal bundle is something that exists only in mathematics - it doesn't really correspond to something you can see or touch. The important thing to know is that it's the name of the object whose dual is being taken. Think of it like a way of connecting point A to point B over a sphere.



If an operation is abelian, it means that the order of numbers on either side doesn't matter. Some great examples of this are multiplication and addition. It doesn't matter if you have 5x3 or 3x5, they both equal 15. The same works with addition: 7+8 = 8+7. Nonabelian is simply the case where this property doesn't happen - like subtraction and division.



A gauge theory is basically a special type of field where a particular thing holds true. In this case, think of a field as being the area in which a force can (and does) act, described by strength and direction. An example would be an electric or magnetic field. A field has something called a "Lagrangian", a function (a set of rules) that can be used to describe the field. For the field to be a gauge, the thing that must hold true is that Lagrangian function should stay the same when subjected to particular kinds of transformations. Thinking of these as transformations in the English sense of the word is OK to do.

A simple thought example of this is the electric field surrounding an electron. It doesn't matter whether you flip the electron upside down, turn it sideways, or inside out. It still has the same negative charge that repels other electrons out to a certain distance, regardless of how it points.





The end result of this is that an instanton is a type of theoretical thing that happens where all of these properties are true. I've really, really oversimplified it for the purposes of example, but the gist of it is that the manifold object is used to abstract the higher dimensions of our space-time into something we can understand, and the instanton is an idea representing a way of connecting multiple points under a particular set of circumstances that can occur.

This type of connection can bleed energy from something that appears to be a vacuum (the false vacuum). Since there's still energy there to be taken, it wasn't really a vacuum at all (defined as a lack of energy).



The suggestion is that the universe formed from a bubble that would have appeared to things inside it to be empty, but wasn't actually quite empty. The rest of it is just an explanation of one way that energy could have been lost.

[anarch]

33. this kind of thing makes me appreciate a Native American term I heard for the highest divinity

the Great Mystery. The universe is an infinitely weird and awesome place.

[anarch]

34. er...rather, the multiverse is

[KansDem]

35. K&R

Outside the 24-hour time limit...:D