![]() But in every instant that passes, we get farther away from them, and we will never intersect. Vilenkin's explanation implies that in some of the infinite bubble universes outside our own, there could be other intelligent observers. The rest of the multiverse remains barren, but no one is there to complain about that." "The reason is that intelligent observers exist only in those rare bubbles in which, by pure chance, the constants happen to be just right for life to evolve. "This picture of the universe, or multiverse, as it is called, explains the long-standing mystery of why the constants of nature appear to be fine-tuned for the emergence of life," Vilenkin wrote. Related: How many stars are in the universe?īut even if we could reach the next bubble, according to eternal inflation (combined with string theory), our familiar universe with its physical constants and habitable conditions could be totally different from the hypothetical bubble universe next to our own. If we were to set off for the edge of our bubble, where it might butt up against the next bubble universe over, we'd never reach it because the edge is zipping away from us faster than the speed of light, and faster than we could ever travel. Those bubble universes can't contact each other because they continue to expand indefinitely. And as inflation ends in a particular place, a new bubble universe forms, Vilenkin wrote for Scientific American in 2011. This is called the theory of eternal inflation. While it ended for everything that we can detect from Earth 13.8 billion years ago, cosmic inflation in fact continues in other places. ![]() According to theoretical physicist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Massachusetts, inflation didn't end everywhere at the same time. That mysterious process of inflation and the Big Bang have convinced some researchers that multiple universes are possible, or even very likely. Related: How an inflating universe could create a multiverse And that's all before the actual expansion of matter that we usually think of as the Big Bang itself, which was a consequence of all this inflation: As the inflation slowed, a flood of matter and radiation appeared, creating the classic Big Bang fireball, and began to form the atoms, molecules, stars and galaxies that populate the vastness of space that surrounds us. Before 10^-32 seconds had passed, the universe had exploded outward to 10^26 times its original size in a process called cosmic inflation. Then, according to the Big Bang theory, it burst into action, inflating faster than the speed of light in all directions for a tiny fraction of a second. Eternal inflation, the Big Bang theory and parallel universesĪround 13.7 billion years ago, everything we know of was an infinitesimal singularity.
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