Never boils. But that somehow never matters.
Do readers remember these stories? The multiverse circus is coming back to a PBS affiliate near you? And If you’ve ever doubted that popular culture loves the multiverse…
Well, here is public broadcasting on Gravitational Waves From Bubble Universe Collisions:
Follow inflation to what many theorists think is its logical conclusion, though, and things get very strange. That’s because many versions of inflation lead straight to a multiverse: that is, a cosmos in which our universe is just one of many universes, each with different laws and fundamental constants of physics. The idea is controversial, not least because there is no guarantee that we would ever be able to prove or disprove the existence of these other universes. Now, a team of theorists has shown that a collision between universes would create gravitational waves that could imprint a unique polarization signal on the sky, potentially providing observational evidence for the existence of other universes.
Jonathan Braden, who worked on the paper while he was a graduate student at the University of Toronto, compares the multiverse to a pot of simmering water. As the water boils, air bubbles big and small spontaneously pop into existence and jiggle about. Now imagine that our entire known universe is one of those air bubbles, swimming through the “water” of the universe’s native vacuum energy, as other bubbles emerge around it. The analogy isn’t perfect: For one thing, the energy that drives the creation of new bubble universes isn’t thermal energy, like the heat of a stove, but the inevitable fluctuations that are built in to the principles of quantum mechanics. Even stranger, the “pot”—the space in which the bubble universes are emerging—is constantly getting bigger, and the water supply always being replenished.
In this ever-simmering universe, bubbles may occasionally bump in to each other. If our universe was part of such a collision some time in the distant past, it could leave a telltale circular “bruise” on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Astronomers first scanned the CMB’s tiny temperature variation for this telltale mark back in 2011, using measurements from NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, but found nothing. A second analysis also came up empty-handed.
One senses that, in general, evidence is irrelevant. People gotta believe.
See also: How the multiverse got invented without evidence. (Doubt as the engine of science?Also known as the war on falsifiability?)
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