- Before the Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe and What Lies Beyond
- Mariner Books (2022)
Every culture has its own creation myth, a description of how the world and people came into being. The culture of science also has such a myth, but it is very new and subject to change.
In her new book, Laura Mersini-Houghton, cosmologist and theoretical physicist, advocates a creation story in which several universes came into being 13.5 billion years ago, not just one. In addition, the author claims that she has evidence of his siblings’ existence in this universe.
Famed quantum physicist Niels Bohr once said of a colleague’s idea, “It’s crazy, but not crazy enough.” The multiverse that emerges from quantum theory may be a little too crazy. It’s not a new idea. But the multiverse’s first serious theorist lost his career over it. It certainly tests the limits of what is acceptable in science.
In the 1950s and 1960s, British physicist Fred Hoyle argued that the universe had neither beginning nor end; it was a “stationary” universe in which new atoms kept appearing and eventually forming stars and planets. He coined the term “Big Bang” to slam his peers who believed the universe suddenly exploded out of nowhere.
Hoyle was wrong. But the Big Bang proponents still had much to explain. If atoms jumping out of nothing sounded impossible, a universe out of nothing wasn’t an improvement. A theory of inflation from the 1970s sounded even crazier: from a subatomic point, in a very small fraction of the first second of its existence, the universe had “inflated” to occupy a space billions of light-years across.
That was crazy, all right, but inflation explained the oddly uniform cosmic microwave background that fills the sky in all directions. If the universe had slowly expanded, small differences in the background would have turned into huge, uneven patches.
A prison state
When Laura Mersini-Houghton began her studies in the USA in the 1990s, she brought something of an outsider’s perspective with her: she had grown up in communist Albania. Political ideology more than once got her father, a mathematician at the University of Tirana, into trouble. Even minor questions about party line could be dangerous, a lesson his daughter understood.
Mersini-Houghton spent her early years in a prison state, isolated from a world she knew little about except through science and mathematics. But with the collapse of Communism, she was able to continue her education elsewhere – and grapple with the problems of the Big Bang.
One problem was the source of the energy that suddenly expanded into the universe. What was the “nothing” we should have broken out of? Others have called it the “quantum foam,” in which particles don’t really exist until they pop out and then disappear again. Mersini-Houghton calls it a “landscape,” an abstract space containing various energies. I have no idea what that means, but I’ll go with it.
Another problem: Quantum physics makes a strange sense on its own, and it’s been proven beyond a doubt. But it’s… weird. On the one hand, subatomic particles can be “entangled” – they influence each other even over large distances. Einstein hated the idea, calling it “creepy action at a distance,” but he was wrong.
Worse, Mersini-Houghton explains, the eminent physicist Roger Penrose calculated that the odds against the appearance of a habitable universe like ours are so high that we shouldn’t even be here to ask questions about it.
I won’t try to paraphrase their long and mostly clear arguments, but an early explanation of the implications of quantum mechanics was a sort of preview of the multiverse. She cites a young physicist, Hugh Everett, who published a doctoral thesis in 1956 in which he argued “that a direct application of quantum mechanics to the universe predicted a complex and bizarre cosmos of multiple worlds intricately convoluted and intricate.”
Quantum mechanics also sees a wave in each subatomic particle that exists in many different places. Since the universe was the size of a subatomic particle, Everett said, “the entire universe, regardless of size, must obey the rules of quantum mechanics.”
That was too crazy an idea for Niels Bohr, who scrapped it. Mersini-Houghton tells us that “Everett was pushed out of an academic career and ended up working in the defense industry.”
Eventually, however, Everett’s ideas found more support. They pointed the way to further thinking about alternate universes (and possible catastrophes for people who thought about it). Nonetheless, Mersini-Houghton and some of her colleagues sought further evidence of a multiverse.
This crisp image of the Southern Ring Nebula was rendered using data from NASA’s Webb near-infrared camera.
Image produced by NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI.
Infinite Possibility
They found it in very slight variations in the cosmic microwave background, the faint echoes of the Big Bang. For a very brief moment, the universe existed as a multiple of itself, as a wave that was in many places at once. These particles were entangled, and as they unraveled and expanded into their own spaces, they left “fingerprints” on each other in the background radiation.
Mersini-Houghton describes the current ferment in cosmology while others join in exploring the idea of the multiverse. Not all agree with her, but all offer intriguing thoughts. One is that every universe keeps spawning new universes – suggesting that Fred Hoyle’s steady-state universe might not have been so wrong after all.
Aside from the objective existence of a multiverse, Mersini-Houghton, with the support of large institutions such as the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, was able to look for it. That says something about the freedom of thought and expression that scientists enjoy today.
It’s also dizzying and exciting to think that a universe arising from nothing could eventually create elements that could coalesce on at least one planet into organisms that can see the universe and begin to understand it. When we look at the universe, it looks at itself through our eyes and thinks about itself. Apparently it has started to think of itself as living in a prison state.
If Laura Mersini-Houghton and her colleagues are right, and universes are as countless as grains of sand, then many of them use creatures like us (and very unlike us) to find one another. Whether we find them or they find us doesn’t matter; we will come out of the prison of our only universe. ![[Tyee]](https://news.google.com/design-article.thetyee.ca/ui/img/yellowblob.png){kind=small}
#Multiverse #Infinity #Tyee
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