The Is: Parallel Worlds, Infinity and the Cosmic Chicken

Living in the philososphere, as I do, is a bit of a curse sometimes.  You get yelled at because you were thinking about what's outside the universe, or whether an omniscient god and free will are logically incompatible.  You live inside your own head too much. You miss what's going on around you.  This is why my last words are likely to be "What bus?"

I spend far too much time wondering where the universe ends and where time began.  As far as bad habits go, it could be worse, I suppose.   I recently finished a fascinating book called The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene, Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Columbia University.  Great read.

Our observable universe is a sphere of about 93 billion light years in diameter.  Although the universe itself is only about 14 billion years old.  Odd:  if the speed is light is the universe's speed limit, how could the universe gotten bigger than the distance light will have travelled since the Big Bang—13.75 billion light years?

The Observable Universe.  The Virgo Supercluster, of which our galaxy is a part, is too small to be seen here.  However if you look carefully, you can spot spot my ego.

The answer, at least in current cosmology, is that the Big Bang didn't happen in space.  It created space.  And time.  And the speed of light is the fastest thing in space, but that limit doesn't apply to the expansion of space itself, for which we know no limit.  Right after the big bang, it is surmised that space itself expanded quite quickly.  Like from the size of a mote of dust to the size of the observable universe in far, far less than a billionth of a second. 

Timeline of the universe including early inflaton field expansion.  Or a funny looking bullhorn.

That allows for a pretty big universe outside of what we can see if it.  Actually the universe could well be infinite.  Anything outside that 93 billion light year sphere is not known and cannot be known by us.  But if it is infinite, that means that there must be other solar systems identical to ours out there.  After all, in a finite volume of space (say the solar system) there are only a finite number of ways that atoms can be configured.  If the universe is infinite, you are bound to come across an identical arrangement sooner or later.  Professor Greene even does the math.

A googol (not the search engine) is a very large number.  It's 10¹⁰⁰, or a 1 with a hundred 0s after it:

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

It's a pretty big number, far greater  than the number of grams in the observable universe (about 10⁵⁶) and around a trillion times bigger than the number of photons in the known universe (10⁸⁸).  

Graphic representation of the concept of a googol.

Also, my son's number is going to be a googol when he plays for the Canucks. Take that, Gretzky. 

Well, I stole their graphic, I should at least plug the product.  You can buy this  American Apparel.

A googolplex is the largest number with a name.  It's ten to the power of a googol (10^googol or 10¹⁰¹⁰⁰).  I wrote googol out above, but if I were to write out the zeros after googolplex in a similar manner, the known universe would likely come to an end far before I got a decent start on it.  Even if I got the fastest computer in the world to do it for me.

Anyways, Dr. Greene has come up with the first practical application of that number that I've seen.  You'd have to walk about a googolplex steps, on average, to reach another system just like ours, with an Earth upon whom resides another you reading this exact same sentence right now.  As a matter of fact, if the universe is infinite, there's an infinite amount of such identical Earths.  And your Other Yous are all right now thinking of each other.

And even if your lottery ticket doesn’t pan out next week, you can take solace in the fact that there are an infinite number of Other Yous in the infinite universe who will be multi-millionaires next week. Isn't infinity fun?

A philosophical questions arises:  if the universe is infinite, does that mean everything is?  Well, no, not if you're talking about our universe. Our universe is bound all over (from what we know) by the same fundamental laws.  Every electron has a mass of 9.109 382... x  10^-31 kg no matter where you are.  Everywhere in the infinite universe the value of universal gravitational constant, the cosmological constant, and the speed of light in vacuum are the same. So anything that is physically possible within the bounds of these universal laws exists in an infinite universe, but anything that breaks those laws cannot. 

But that's OK, we've got a work-around.

The inflaton field theory, shown in the bullhorn diagram above, states that inflaton particles expanded the space of our universe early on until the inflatons wore themselves out allowing an environment where subatomic particles, and then atoms, and molecules and stars and planets and us could happen.  But in an interpretation of that theory, the inflaton expansion—that is space expanding and trillions upon trillions faster than the speed of light—is still ongoing.  Now and then, in areas, the inflaton fields diminish allowing the precipitation of normal matter creating bubble universes in the inflaton field.  This is the Swiss Cheese model of the universe--the cheese part being the quickly expanding inflationary field and the holes in the cheese being bubble universes.

These universes may well differ than ours. They may not be held to the same basic physical laws. Protons may be a little lighter.  Pi might be equal to 3 instead of 3.1414... In 11-dimensional string theory, our space consists of 3 spatial dimensions and one time dimension.  The other dimensions are all wrapped up at the subatomic level, like a seed that never sprouted.  But other universes could have different dimensions than the four space-time dimensions we perceive.  Or it could have five, six or seven dimensions.  I string theory there are some 10⁵⁰⁰ dimensional configurations for universes currently.

Due to kind of Einsteinian judo flip where space and time change place, these bubble universes, while being finite when viewed from the cheesy part of the Swiss Cheese model (the inflaton field) are infinite when viewed from the inside the bubble.

So now you potentially have an infinite number of infinite universes, including an infinite amount with fundamental properties different than our own.  But still governed, overall, by the fundamental mathematics of the inflaton field itself. 

Entering an entirely speculative realm, you could kick it up one more notch still and hypothesize that our big bang that created this Swiss Cheese multiverse was just one of many--say one of an infinite number of big bangs with infinite variety--all caused by some other primordial first cause.  If the Big Bang is the Cosmic Egg, then this would be the Cosmic Chicken laying an infinite number of eggs.  

Hubble Telescope view of Cosmic Chicken.

This leads to an infinite number of multiverses containing infinite numbers of infinite universes.  And you could kick it up another notch saying that there are an infinite number of Cosmic Chickens.  As a matter of fact, you could kick it up an infinite number of notches.

Anyway, if you notice while talking to me one time that I seem to be spaced out, that's probably what I'm thinking about.

Postscript: this term "multiverse," meaning this universes and all the other potential universes out there I find rather awkward and less than inspiring.  I'm going to rename the multiverse The Is, simply because anything that isn't in the multiverse Isn't.