Multiverse

Some scientists have suggested that the Universe we live in might be just a tiny part of a much larger object sometimes called the Multiverse (meaning "many universes") each completely separate and unable to communicate with any of the others.

Each universe in the multiverse is completely separate from all the others

The existence of the Multiverse was first suggested on theoretical grounds by Russian Andrei Linde as he developed his Chaotic Inflation Theory.

Creation of the Universe

According to Linde's eternal inflation theory, new universes bubble into existence all the time within the Multiverse, probably as a random event. Note that there might be many such universes in the Multiverse. If so, each must be completely independent of all the others and governed by different laws of science.

In this story I will choose one of them and trace its evolution as it turns into our present Universe, where conditions are just right so that stars, planets and life would form.

The Universe is what we can see from Earth using the most powerful telescopes - sometimes called the "observable Universe".

I use a capital U to differentiate our Universe from all the others which might have formed in the Multiverse.

Once the Universe had been created, it was completely divorced from the enclosing Multiverse, occupying a totally different spacetime, so that nothing can ever move into or out of our Universe. We are trapped inside it. We can never visit or even see the billions of other universes which might be out there somewhere. We do not know what interesting things may be happening in them.

Nevertheless, there might be a way of testing the eternal inflation theory.

According to Dr Hiranya Peiris, a cosmologist at University College London, and her colleagues, when bubble universes are created adjacent to our own they may leave a characteristic pattern in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation.