When Louis de Broglie first proposed in 1924 that particles had wavelike properties, the technological challenges to investigating the idea were so immense that the prospects for testing it seemed to lie very far into the distant future, if at all. But one of the features of science is that however incredible an idea may seem when it is first proposed, if it gains credibility and acceptance from the scientific community as a whole, it will only be a matter of time before someone finds an ingenious way to try and test it. So it was with de Broglie’s idea. It was such so beautiful in the way that it unified waves and particles in a symmetric way in quantum mechanics, that it spurred creative thinking and within just three years C. J. Davisson and L. Germer were able to construct an experiment that confirmed it, resulting in de Broglie receiving the Nobel Prize in 1929, an incredibly rapid pace of advance.
So it is with the multiverse idea, that entire universes can be created spontaneously from the vacuum and thus our own universe may be just one of an enormous number (as many as 10500) of universes, each having their own laws and structure. This idea not only does not violate the laws of science, it is not even a new theory, being in fact a prediction of other theories.
As with de Broglie’s hypothesis, when the multiverse idea was initially proposed there seemed to be no way to test it. But now people have come along with suggestions of how to do it, by looking for disk-like patterns in the cosmic microwave background that may be the telltale relics of collisions of other universes with our own.
Science is such fun.
Shalom Mano,
Very fun indeed!
B’shalom,
Jeff
I don’t see why one should expect any evidence of another universe from the CMB. The CMB represents almost 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
I’ve never seen it myself, but I’ve been told that de Broglie’s doctoral thesis is ridiculously short because is simply the derivation of the de Broglie relationship.
Without a doubt, the possibility of other universes existing and even bumping into ours is rather exciting. Ya, I remember my jaw dropping to the floor when I read about something called ‘dark flow’. Here’s a quick excerpt from New Scientist (Mystery ‘dark flow’ extends towards edge of universe | 16 November 2009 | Marcus Chown).
SOMETHING big is out there beyond the visible edge of our universe. That’s the conclusion of the largest analysis to date of over 1000 galaxy clusters streaming in one direction at blistering speeds. Some researchers say this so-called “dark flow” is a sign that other universes nestle next door.
Last year, Sasha Kashlinsky of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and colleagues identified an unusual pattern in the motion of around 800 galaxy clusters. They studied the clusters’ motion in the “afterglow” of the big bang, as measured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). The photons of this afterglow collide with electrons in galaxy clusters as they travel across space to the Earth, and this subtly changes the afterglow’s temperature.
The team combined the WMAP data with X-ray observations and found the clusters were streaming at up to 1000 kilometres per second towards one particular part of the cosmos (The Astrophysical Journal Letters, vol 686, p L49).
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One explanation for the flow would be the gravity of a huge concentration of matter, but this is very unlikely. Within the standard big bang picture, massive cosmic structures were “seeded” by random quantum fluctuations, so overall, matter should be spread evenly.
There could be an exotic explanation. Laura Mersini-Houghton of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, thinks the flow is a sign of a neighbouring universe. If the tiny patch of vacuum that inflated to become our universe was quantum entangled with other pieces of vacuum -- other universes -- they could have exerted a force from beyond the present-day visible horizon.
What a timeline of events and a hit to our ego:
Earth is center of universe; sun, moon, and stars revolve around Earth. We humans rock!
Wait, what? Earth is not center of the Universe, but rather the Earth revolves around the sun? Well, OK but our solar system is at least the center of the Universe. We humans are still pretty cool!
Hold on, looks like our solar system is not the center of the Universe, as our star happens to be on a distant arm of the galaxy. Not only that, but our rather typical galaxy is one of about a hundred billion other galaxies in our Universe. That would make our sun one of HOW many stars?! Gosh I’m feeling a little small now.
Our universe may be only one of many universes?!!! Why do you keep using exponents to indicate the quantity of something?
I for one can’t wait to hear more definitive evidence on what is causing this dark flow. Good heavens I’m terrible at waiting, I want to know now!