Are we part of a multiverse?

Photo Credit: Ivan Slade

The field of particle physics is bizarre. Time stands still inside black holes, electrons are simultaneously found in more than one location, cats are neither dead or alive. You need quite a large intellect to get your head around these ideas. That or a large imagination. I possess far more of the latter which I’m going to utilise in this article to contemplate the weirdest of all theories: the multiverse.

It has been proposed by smart people that we don’t live in a solitary universe. Fine, I can accept that. But if there’s more than one, and this is the smart people talking again, why should there be a limit to how many there might be? In other words, an infinite number of universes may well exist.

Follow that train of thought and you’ll start to wonder about the consequences. One in particular is a tad unsettling. If there are infinite universes there must be infinite versions of every one of us getting on with their (our?) lives somewhere in the multiverse.

In one universe there’s a me, absolutely identical to the actual me in every way except one hair in my left nostril is a fraction of a millimetre shorter and I can’t quite grasp it with the tweezers.

In another, Hertha BSC have won the Champions League but that means nothing to me because instead of settling in Berlin, I moved to Spain, bought a Real Madrid season ticket and watched Christiano Ronaldo play every week. And in that universe footballers all have tails.

Ridiculous of course. Or maybe not. Let’s break it down. Start simple and go from there.

We’re surrounded by a lot of stuff - scattered across our desks, outside our windows, on the planet, in the cosmos. Stuff is made up of atoms. Atoms are very very small. There are lots of atoms in the universe.

ChatGPT would be able to tell us roughly how many but what’s the point in asking? Suffice to say it’s a big number, far beyond anything the human brain can meaningfully process. But it is a finite number. If you were an immortal being with nothing better to do, you could count them all and eventually complete the task.

Now think about how many different ways you could arrange every atom in the universe. Actually, don’t think about that yet. Start with two smarties. In how many different ways can you arrange two smarties on a tabletop? Easy, two.

Three smarties? Still easy, six. The formula is 1 x 2 x 3 and with each additional, delicious, chocolaty orb, the result grows fast. By the time you get to ten, there are over three million distinct arrangements. Now apply that to the total number of atoms in the universe. Insane. But, again, not infinite. If you were an immortal being who knows exactly how many atoms there are because you’ve counted them yourself, you could then proceed to distribute them in every way possible and the day that project concludes would eventually dawn, although it's unlikely there would still be a sun to rise at dawn.

Now for a leap of imagination. If there are indeed infinite universes, each and every possible arrangement of atoms must occur somewhere. And because the number of arrangements is finite, each and every one of them occurs an infinite number of times. All the subatomic particles that make you what you are, exist in slightly, and vastly, different configurations elsewhere. There are infinite versions of you.

Even compared with the most ludicrous sounding theories that nutty professors come up with on their lunch breaks, this sounds like utter nonsense and it’s more or less agreed within the scientific community that the multiverse hypothesis can never be proved experimentally. However, solutions to equations derived from other proven theories point to it being plausible.

Let’s go back to all the stuff cluttering our desks and the cosmos. Where did it come from? A big bang is the generally accepted explanation for the origin of matter, matter that is currently flying apart in an expanding universe.

If something is expanding, it’s bigger today than it was yesterday and tomorrow it’ll be bigger than it is today. It’s worth stating the obvious because it demonstrates something profound: the concept of time. Time, as we know it Jim, began at the Big Bang. Before that there was no time. Or there was infinite time. It makes no difference. Time is/was not how we now perceive it.

Hold that thought because it’s about time (pun absolutely intended) that I remedy something here. It’s considered bad form to write anything containing words like ‘particle’ and ‘universe’, be it a thoroughly researched scientific paper or a whimsical blog article, without citing Albert Einstein and his famous formula E=MC², even if you don’t know what it means. It’s a song, isn’t it?

Here’s what I do get: E is energy, M is mass (i.e. stuff) and C is the speed of light. Because the speed of light is constant, the formula basically states that energy is equivalent to mass. They’re the same thing just in different forms and those forms are interchangeable.

When you burn a piece of wood it disintegrates and you feel heat. That’s mass being converted into energy. Turning energy into mass seems a bit more abstract because it’s not something we commonly experience but it does happen in the atomic realm, which is fortunate because that’s where stuff comes from.

Light moves fast. Indeed, nothing moves faster. It sets the universal speed limit which is another very big number. Looking at the formula again, this implies an enormous amount of energy is stored in a mere smidgen of mass. Unfortunately for our daily requirements, it’s not easily accessible, being locked up in the atomic nuclei but, broadly speaking, nuclear bombs work by releasing some of this energy. The potential is there, waiting, until burning stuff has taken us as far as it can.

To highlight two key points my babble may have obscured:

• Time before the Big Bang was, in effect, infinite.
• Solid mass can be created from pure energy.

So what is/was going on in the infinite period of time outside our universe before - and after - the Big Bang?

It’s reasonable to hypothesise that all the matter inside our universe was produced in a seething bath of energy at the moment of the Big Bang, using a miniscule amount of what's available. Kind of like a jacuzzi, madly frothing and bubbling away for all eternity. When a threshold is reached, a bubble bursts, a big bang occurs and a universe is born.

This has been going on forever and will continue forever; time has no meaning before big bangs. So it’s perfectly possible there exists an infinite number of universes, infinite examples of every possible arrangement of atoms and therefore, an infinite number of yous and mes. Whatever can happen has happened and will happen again.