Three decades ago, the so-called inflation theory began to spread in the scientific world. At the center of this concept is the idea of a special form of matter, called “false vacuum”. It has very high energy characteristics and high negative pressure. The most amazing property of a false vacuum is repulsive gravity. A space filled with such a vacuum can quickly expand in different directions.
Spontaneously arising vacuum “bubbles” spread at the speed of light, but practically do not collide with each other, because the space between such formations expands at the same speed. It is assumed that humanity lives in one of many such “bubbles”, which are perceived as an expanding Universe.
From an ordinary point of view, multiple “bubbles” of a false vacuum are a series of other, completely self-sufficient bubbles. The catch is that there are no direct material connections between these hypothetical formations. Therefore, unfortunately, it will not be possible to move from one universe to another.
Scientists conclude that the number of universes that look like “bubbles” can be infinite, and each of them expands without any restrictions. In universes that never intersect with the one where the solar system is located, an infinite number of options for the development of events are formed. Who knows, maybe in one of these “bubbles” the history of the Earth is exactly repeated?
Parallel universes: hypotheses require confirmation
It is possible, however, that other universes, which can conventionally be called parallel, are based on completely different physical principles. Even the set of fundamental constants in “bubbles” may differ significantly from those provided in the native Universe of humanity.
It is quite possible that life, if it is a natural result of the development of any matter, in a parallel universe can be built on principles that are incredible for earthlings. What then could be the Mind in neighboring universes? Only science fiction writers can judge this for now.
It is not possible to directly test the hypothesis about the existence of another universe or even many such worlds. Researchers are working to collect “circumstantial evidence,” looking for workarounds to confirm scientific assumptions. So far, scientists have only more or less convincing guesses based on the results of studying cosmic microwave background radiation, which sheds light on the history of the origin of the Universe.
Other universes. What are they?
So, by the end of the last century, through the efforts of scientists of many specialties, it was found that the universe has an incredibly complex structure, at least much more complex than what was imagined by scientists at the beginning of the last century.
Now even a layman knows that neither the Earth, nor the Sun, nor our Galaxy are the centers of the Universe. And we live in the so-called Metagalaxy, which is also rapidly expanding.
There are countless galaxies in it, and each consists of tens or even hundreds of billions of star-suns.
Now let’s try to simulate a picture of the universe in which, in addition to our Universe, there are other worlds similar or different from it.
To begin with, as soon as astronomers established that the Metagalaxy was expanding, the hypothesis of the Big Bang, which is believed to have occurred approximately 15 billion years ago, almost immediately appeared.
After this event, very dense and hot matter passed through the stages of the “hot Universe” one after another. Thus, 1 billion years after the Big Bang, “protogalaxies,” or primeval galaxies, began to appear from the clouds of hydrogen and helium that had arisen by that time, and the first stars began to appear in them.
The famous Soviet physicist Academician Ya.B. spoke about this process. Zeldovich once wrote: “The Big Bang theory at the moment does not have any noticeable shortcomings. I would even say that it is as firmly established and true as it is true that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Both theories occupied a central place in the picture of the universe of their time, and both had many opponents who argued that the new ideas contained in them were absurd and contrary to common sense. But such speeches are not able to hinder the success of new theories.”
Maybe other universes look like this
This was said in the early 80s of the last century, when the first timid attempts were already being made to significantly supplement the “hot Universe” hypothesis with new ideas and principles.
It was at this time, at the intersection of physics and astrophysics, that the largely strange idea of an “inflating Universe” appeared. Its essence lies in the fact that in the first instant of its appearance, the Universe expanded monstrously quickly. In just an insignificant fraction of a second, the size of the nascent Universe grew not 10 times, as it should have happened during a “normal” expansion, but 1050 or even 101000000 times.
But the most surprising thing about these processes is that, although the expansion occurred at an accelerated rate, the energy per unit volume remained constant. Moreover, astrophysicists prove that the first moments of this lightning-fast expansion took place in a “vacuum”.
But this vacuum was not the usual one that we conventionally imagine, but a false one, since it is impossible to call a “vacuum” in the accepted sense of the word that volume of space in which the density of matter reaches 1077 kilograms per cubic meter.
It is from such an unimaginable vacuum that, according to scientists, many metagalaxies could be formed, including, of course, ours. And each of them has its own physical constants, its own structure and other properties and parameters characteristic of it.
But if this is actually the case, then a completely logical question arises: where is this “relative” of our Metagalaxy?
Most likely, these universes, including ours, were formed as a result of the “inflation” of numerous spheres, or regions, into which the Universe broke up in the first moments after the Big Bang.
And since each such region, which became a separate metagalaxy, swelled to a size exceeding the current size of our Metagalaxy, their boundaries are located at enormous distances. Perhaps the nearest mini-universe is located at a distance of about 1035 light years from us. But the diameter of our Metagalaxy is “only” ten billion light years.
It turns out that somewhere far, far away from us and from each other, in the bottomless depths of the universe, there exist other, probably completely fantastic worlds...
It turns out that the world we live in is many times more complex than previously thought. At least this is what cosmologists prove. And it consists of countless universes in the Universe. But we still know almost nothing about this large, comprehensive, complex, amazingly diverse Universe.
The only thing we still know is that all these worlds that exist outside of our Metagalaxy are real.
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Stephen Hawking is a theoretical physicist who became famous for his research in quantum gravity and cosmology. The scientist died in March 2018, at the age of 76. In his new book, which was published posthumously, Hawking wrote that God cannot exist in our Universe. But why?
"Short answers to big questions"
Often to the chagrin of religious critics, Hawking boldly answered questions such as “What is our purpose?”, “Are we alone in the Universe?”, “Where do we come from?” Like most scientists, the English theoretical physicist was looking for answers to solve the puzzle of the creation of everything that surrounds us.
In his latest book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, which was published October 16, 2018, the professor begins a series of 10 intergalactic essays by addressing life's oldest and most religious question: Is there a God?
Hawking's answer to this question should not surprise readers, especially those who have followed his work avidly. Brief Answers to the Big Questions was compiled from interviews, essays and speeches over the past decades and is based on the opinions and support of the scientist's family and colleagues.
“I think that the Universe was created spontaneously out of nothing, according to the laws of science. If you accept, as I do, that the laws of nature are fixed, then it doesn’t take long to ask: What role is assigned to God?” - Hawking wrote in one of his essays.
The Big Bang Theory
During his lifetime, the famous physicist adhered to the Big Bang Theory, which states that the Universe began with an explosion from a super-dense singularity smaller than an atom. From the smallest speck came all the matter, energy and empty space that the Universe has ever contained.
All these raw materials turned into the cosmos that we perceive today, following strict scientific laws. For Hawking and many like-minded scientists, the laws of gravity, relativity, quantum physics and some others can explain all the processes that have ever happened or will happen.
Quantum mechanics will help you find the answer
“If you want, you can consider all physical laws to be the work of God, but this is more a definition of God than a proof of existence. When the Universe is running on science-oriented autopilot, the only role for an omnipotent deity may be to set the initial conditions of the Universe so that those laws can take form - a divine creator who caused the Big Bang and then stood back to contemplate the subsequent work.
Did God create quantum laws that became the basis for the emergence of the vast cosmos? I have no desire to offend religious people, but I think that science has a more convincing explanation for the creation of our world than the creator,” the scientist wrote.
Hawking's explanation begins with quantum mechanics, which shows how elementary particles behave. In quantum research, it is common to see subatomic particles such as protons and electrons seemingly appear out of nowhere, linger for a while, and then disappear again before appearing in a completely different location. Since the Universe was once the size of a subatomic particle itself, it is likely that it behaved similarly during the Big Bang.
Without time, does God not exist?
“The Universe itself, in all its mind-blowing vastness and complexity, could simply have arisen without violating the known laws of nature,” the scientist wrote.
This still doesn't explain the possibility that God created this proton-sized singularity and then flipped the quantum mechanical switch that led to the Big Bang. But Hawking said that science can explain this fact. As an example, he points to the physical properties of black holes—collapsed stars that are so dense that nothing, including light, can escape their gravitational pull.
Black holes, like the Universe before the Big Bang, were compressed into a singularity. At this ultra-packed point of mass, gravity is so strong that it distorts time as well as light and space. Simply put, time does not exist in the depths of a black hole.
Hawking's religion
Since the Universe also began with a singularity, time itself could not have existed before the Big Bang. “We have finally found something that has no cause because there was no time for a cause to exist. For me, this means that there is no possibility of a Creator, because there was no time for him,” the scientist described.
This argument will do little to convince theistic believers, but proving anything to people was never Hawking's intention. A scientist with an almost religious devotion to understanding the cosmos, he sought to “know the mind of God” by learning everything he could about the self-sufficient Universe around us. While his view of the cosmos may make a divine creator and the laws of nature incompatible, he still leaves plenty of room for faith, hope, wonder and gratitude.
“We have one lifetime to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am very grateful,” Hawking concludes the first chapter of his posthumous book.
GN Z-11, the most observable galaxy from Earth. Image: NASA, ESA, and P. Oesch (Yale University) / CC BY 4.0
Heavenly Harmony
Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer who lived at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, was obsessed with one strange idea: he believed that the six planets of the solar system known in his time ideally embodied the harmony of divine design. He processed the observational data of another astronomer, Tycho Brahe, and tried to reduce the trajectories of the planets to the five “Platonic solids” - regular polyhedra, described by the ancient Greeks.
By the end of the 16th century, the celestial puzzle was complete. Kepler published a book Mysterium Cosmographicum(“The Mystery of the Universe”), in which the orbits of the six then known planets formed a harmonious geometric system reminiscent of a nesting doll. The orbit of Saturn (the farthest planet at that time) was a circle on the surface of a ball circumscribed around a cube, inside this cube there was another ball with the orbit of Jupiter, and a tetrahedron was inscribed inside the Jupiterian ball - and so on with a perfect alternation of balls nested in five different polyhedra. Complete harmony of earthly bodies and heavenly bodies.
Several years have passed, and Kepler's cosmic beauty has faded somewhat. At first, critics noticed that the celestial spheres and polyhedra fit into each other inaccurately, and then Kepler himself showed that the orbits of the planets are not circles, but ellipses, and, disappointed with his past ideas, switched to another task: now he was looking for an encrypted celestial harmony in the sizes of these ellipses.
But time put everything in its place: neither in the shapes of the orbits, nor in their sizes were there any encrypted patterns that hide the true nature of things. Only the chaos of cosmic dust gathered into random clumps of matter. Improvisation of nature with the only rule - do not forget about universal gravity and several other laws that describe the world.
In physical equations there are various constants, the values of which cannot be derived from other laws, but can only be remembered. The speed of light, Planck's constant, elementary charge - strange angular numbers that seem to have fallen on us out of nowhere. A real fate.
Many people do not like this, and they try to find an explanation for the constants. Some, due to a lack of mathematical education, are looking for the secret codes of nature, others write complex equations of string theory and quantum gravity in order to obtain the values of constants from other laws, and still others simply push this question somewhere far away from their consciousness, so as not to repeat Kepler’s mistake. , who spent his entire life searching for a reasonable explanation for randomness.
But these strategies have not yet turned out to be anything good. No one has yet been able to derive the constants, and it is somewhat strange to silently consider their values as mere chance: they are too well matched to each other. Take the same dark energy: if it were a little less, nothing would prevent gravity from collapsing all matter into one infinitely dense singularity, and a little more - and under the influence of dark energy, not only matter-free, empty areas of the Universe would expand, but also all celestial bodies, the atoms of which would gradually spread throughout the world.
Such fine tuning of fundamental constants poses an unusual choice: our world and its laws become, to a first approximation, either an incredible accident or a consequence of intelligent design. One way around this dilemma could be the Multiverse hypothesis, according to which there are many more, perhaps even an infinite number of different universes in the real world, and each of them has its own laws of physics with its own sets of constants: somewhere they are completely inappropriate for the origin of intelligent life, but somewhere it seemed that they were specially adjusted so that millions of atoms of matter would one day gather into a strange, seemingly intelligent agglomerate and ask the question: “Where then should we look for these other universes, if we need them so much?”
Foam of universes
As usual, different scientists understand completely different things by the word “Multiverse”. Some are looking for other universes on branes - multidimensional objects from string theory, others believe in universes born on the other side of black holes. And still others suggest taking a closer look at the birth of our own Universe, and so far their approach is much more productive than others.
Little is known about the birth of our world. Where, how, who are the parents - we do not have any documents or witnesses who can tell us why our Universe appeared and whether there was anything before it. But based on some features of the adult Universe, scientists can guess what happened literally in the first moments of its life, and restore the first cosmic breath of the world.
This is called the theory of inflation. In the 80s of the last century, physicists built a model according to which, already 10 -42 seconds after the beginning of time, our Universe began to expand so quickly that in just a few vanishing fractions of a second, a piece of space the size of a small pebble caressed by the surf stretched to a huge visible we have a bubble billions of light years in diameter.
Then this space was filled only with pure energy, which was continuously pumped from somewhere from an unknown source (it is also called dark energy, but, apparently, it is of a slightly different nature than modern dark energy), and then the energy suddenly decayed and turned into quarks , photons, electrons and other particles familiar to us - this happened 10 -36 seconds after the birth of the Universe, and the Big Bang itself is now often called a consequence of inflation.
Strange, but this fantastic theory does a good job of describing some features of our modern Universe that previous models could not cope with:
- Why is the Universe visible to us flat?
The expansion was so fast that the radius of curvature of the world increased almost to infinity.
- Why is it homogeneous on large cosmic scales?
The Universe was born from a small piece of space, which during the fleeting time of expansion simply could not lose its homogeneity.
- Why are there only small local density fluctuations in the Universe?
The Universe was so small that it had every right to be called a quantum object, which means that it contained quantum fluctuations of the vacuum, then picked up by inflation and inflated to primary fluctuations in the density of matter, from which all large structures had already formed over billions of years of subsequent evolution.
In this story of the birth of the Universe, as always, there are many fundamental questions: why inflation began, what fueled it, why it ended. Scientists are looking for answers to them, but often instead they get completely unexpected results. Thus, one of the main authors of the theory of inflation, Soviet physicist Andrei Linde (now he has been living and working in the USA for a long time), formulated the theory of chaotic inflation in 1983, in which he showed that the incredible expansion of space does not have to end in other parts of our world, and certainly not it certainly hardly happened only once.
According to Linda, the whole world is the Multiverse, a huge, boundless space filled with mysterious energy, which at any random moment in time can condense into a tiny point in order to inflate it through inflation into a giant bubble of the Universe filled with various evolving matter. This is how our Universe could be born, and in parallel, somewhere not far from it - just a few trillion light years away - one, two, three bubbles of other universes could have condensed.
In the theory of inflation, the Multiverse hypothesis no longer looks like a trick, the only convenient way out of the dilemma of fatal chance and design, but is obtained in a logical mathematical way: if a person accepts the theory of inflation, then he must accept other universes. Not everyone likes it. For example, the American cosmologist Paul Steinhardt, who participated in working out some of the details of the theory of inflation, became disillusioned with his views after other universes appeared on the scene and now says that the Multiverse simply buried his favorite theory.
Many of his colleagues are more romantic and for this whole story they even came up with a beautiful metaphor of the “foam of the universes”: the seashore and waves in the unknown distance, the sound of the surf, the crackling of cicadas - we live in a small bubble in the middle of a huge Multiverse.
Vague memories
Seeing, hearing, feeling other universes is not easy. Other laws of physics, other constants - perhaps even unaware of the electromagnetic waves on which our vision is based - finally, huge distances between different bubbles of universes. It seems simply unrealistic to receive a signal about what is happening right now in a parallel world, but you can do it differently - look into the past. Just as continents separated by oceans contain traces of a common past in the patterns of their coastlines, data about the past of our Universe may hide other worlds. So, in search of other universes, scientists are looking closely at the cosmic microwave background radiation - the first memory of our own Universe.
Immediately after inflation ended, the Universe was filled with matter so hot and dense that photons could not travel very far through it and were constantly scattered and re-emitted. If there were an intelligent observer in that world (capable of living at incredibly high temperatures and with a whole bunch of other cosmic restrictions), he would only see what is happening in his immediate vicinity. But the Universe gradually expanded and cooled, and 300 thousand years after the Big Bang, the Universe suddenly became transparent to light over large distances.
CMB radiation is the first photons emitted then in the farthest corners of the Universe and, billions of years later, finally reaching the Earth. We do not know how and where our Universe was born, but we can look at this first memory, emerging from under the veil of infantile unconsciousness, in order to find in it vague echoes of the missing brothers and sisters of our world.
CMB radiation is almost completely homogeneous: from every point in the distant Universe, uniform thermal noise comes to us, as if from a body with a temperature of 2.7 K. However, this signal still contains tiny fluctuations - small temperature differences, which are considered a kind of imprint of the very first quantum fluctuations in the density of matter seeded during inflation. It is in these inhomogeneities that they are trying to find evidence of the Multiverse.
There are two main strategies here. Some scientists are looking for traces of a physical collision between two bubbles of universes. Others resort to more complex logical constructions. For example, American cosmologist Laura Mersini-Houghton believes that neighboring universes in the first moments of their existence not only obeyed the laws of quantum mechanics, but also were among themselves, since they were born in the common space of the Multiverse - their characteristics depended on each other .
In 2008, Mersini-Houghton and her colleagues even formulated nine signs of such codependency, which can be found using various physical observations. Eight of them come from the cosmic microwave background radiation (for example, there should be an asymmetry between the southern and northern hemispheres of the sky), and the ninth evidence of the Multiverse was supposed to be the failure of the supersymmetry hypothesis in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.
Then everything developed somewhat contradictorily. In some works one can find experimental confirmation of each of the nine signs, and in others - their refutation. For example, the Multiverse hypothesis, according to the conclusions of Mersini-Houghton, automatically means the presence of the so-called dark stream - the coordinated movement of a large group of galaxies, and the opinions of different experimental groups on this issue differ greatly: some show that the CMB data confirm the dark stream, while others - on the contrary, refute . So the relic memory still seems too blurry to draw reliable conclusions about the relatives of our world.
The multiverse still remains only a nice hypothesis that helps to sort out some of the contradictions and at the same time enjoy the exciting prospect. There, somewhere in the gentle foam of the Multiverse, there existed or right now exists another bubble of rarefied matter - with its own Milky Way galaxy, solar system and its own Johannes Kepler, dreaming of celestial harmony. Beautiful, fascinating and highly questionable - like the legends of Atlantis and other sunken continents.
Out of range
The most telling story here is that of the CMB cold spot, a large region in the constellation Eridanus whose emission temperature is 70 microkelvins lower than the average CMB temperature. This is quite small for a value of 2.7 kelvins, but almost four times the average temperature fluctuations across the entire CMB, which are about 18 microkelvins.
The cold spot was on Mersini-Houghton's list, but later other scientists found a simpler interpretation for it. The CMB anomaly was explained by a giant supervoid 1.8 billion light-years across, a region devoid of galaxies or other large accumulations of matter located in the path of light traveling from the cold spot to Earth.
However, this year a group of astrophysicists from Durham University said that such a rational explanation is unrealistic. Scientists collected data on seven thousand galaxies in the vicinity of the cold spot and showed that the nature of their movement completely excludes the possibility of the existence of a giant supervoid. Instead, the data indicates that this region is filled with small voids separated by galaxies and galaxy clusters.
However, this structure, unlike the rejected supervoid, explains the cold spot with great difficulty: according to researchers, there is only one chance in fifty that such an arrangement of masses in the cosmic microwave background radiation could accidentally result in such an anomaly.
And here the reaction of the study authors to the inexplicable is indicative: “The most impressive consequence of our work is that the cold spot may be caused by a collision of our Universe with a bubble of another Universe. If further analysis of the cosmic microwave background radiation confirms this, then the cold spot could be accepted as the first evidence of the Multiverse.” It seems like an immediate, almost reflexive move: if you don’t see a way to explain the data by the laws of this world, use the Multiverse. The magnetic force of attraction is an idea almost beyond the reach of rigorous testing.
However, should everything that exists in reality be reliably embodied in numbers and measurements? If, billions of years later, there suddenly becomes a little more dark energy in our Universe than now, then the accelerated expansion of space will begin to pull apart even gravitationally connected objects - for example, neighboring galaxies. And one day the last star outside the Milky Way will disappear beyond the horizon of oblivion. The light of other galaxies will never shine on the night sky again. It is unlikely that then our distant descendants will believe that the Large and Small Magellanic clouds, the Andromeda galaxy, and even more so GN-z11 - a reddish dot on the very border of the world visible today - exist in the world.
Mikhail Petrov
