The Multiverse

One Sunday at dinner, an eight-year-old grandchild casually asked, “Boka, have you heard of the Multiverse.” I had.

Among the many blessings I’ve enjoyed in my life is a rasher of grandchildren, any one of whom can engage me in thought-provoking conversation at the drop of a fork. There’s rarely a sit down dinner without talk turning to biology, cosmology or theology.

But this Sunday’s topic made me realize that I had not given the concept of ‘Multiverse’ enough thought. The idea is simple: we live in a universe, dah! So, couldn’t there be other universes as well – places where we don’t currently reside?

Of course, the answer is, “Yes!” But now I feel like I’m standing at the counter of a Baskin & Robbins, answering my server’s first question, “Can I help you?”

“Yes, you can,” but I better tell you how you can help me, or we’re going to be staring at each other for a very long time and the line of potential customers behind me might become a bit unruly: “Three scoops please, Jamoca Almond Fudge, German Chocolate Cake and of course, Pralines & Cream.” Yup, those are flavors of ice cream, unrelated to candy, pastry or beverages of any kind.

Like ice cream, the concept of Multiverse comes in flavors. Of course, our standard model of cosmology is built around the idea that we live in a single, unique universe, finite in space and time. In other words, not a Multiverse!

Cosmology is a lot like public opinion polling. We only have access to a tiny percentage of the potential data points – because of cosmic expansion, most of the universe ‘created’ at Big Bang has already crossed the event horizon and is no longer even potentially detectable by us. 

Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, there’s no reason to suppose that physics ‘through the looking glass’ is any different from physics here and now. If that assumption is correct, then (1) polling will accurately predict the outcome of the next election and (2) there’s no need to posit a Multiverse. 

But Hugh Everett (1957) had a different idea. He thought that every event, every choice, every bifurcation ‘created’ its own unique universe. Instead of ‘many events in one universe’ Everett gave us ‘one event in one universe’. 

His ‘Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics’ (MWI) delivers the ultimate Multiverse – an Omniverse made up entirely of discrete universes. To be clear, most of us think of Universe as something like ‘the set of all astronomical phenomena’; Everett thinks of Universe as the set of all universes. 

Between ‘No Multiverse’ and ‘Only Multiverse’, there are a number of hybrid positions. Lisa Randall, for example, posits multiple self-contained universes (called ‘branes’), sharing common borders (ergo ‘membranes’). Each universe is self-contained, probably erupting at its own Big Bang and continuing to its own Heat Death. 

But there’s a leak somewhere in the system. Something must cross the ‘Brane/Brane Barrier’ (BBB) or our universe would be unaffected by the others; we would have no way to detect them and no reason to want to. Our prime suspect in Leakgate is Gravity – possibly a solution to the ‘missing mass’ dilemma, perhaps preferable to the ‘dark matter’ fix.  

These various scenarios have more in common than you might think. For example, they all assume that the omni/multi/uni/verse is finite in space and time. Absent a transcendent creator, I find this counterintuitive. Defenders of these models struggle mightily with the 5 W’s: What, Where, When, How and Why? Finitude per se is its own mystery.

Aristotle, on the other hand, didn’t worry about silly adverbs. He proposed a universe infinite in both space and time. But introducing the notion of infinity sets off its own cascade of problems, some scientific, some philosophical. 

For example, in an infinite universe there would be an infinite number of data points, each point assuming every possible value at least once. But in an infinite universe, every possible value of any data point will occur an infinite number of times. 

Plus data points form patterns. To the extent that events are independent of one another, the number of patterns they can form is infinite, and each such pattern would repeat an infinite number of times. So our universe would consist of every possible state-of-affairs repeated an infinite number of times. Ugh!

Now, if I have a Universe defined as everything that could possibly happen, happening an infinite number of times, and forming an infinite number of patterns, each recurring an infinite number of times…do I have anything at all? Or have I just found a clever way to say, “Nothing!” Not a Multiverse, not a Universe, Nothing.

Remember Gregory Bateson’s ontological criterion: a difference that makes a difference. In an infinite model, nothing is different (unique) and therefore nothing makes any difference per se; everything that can happen, does happen, and it happens an infinite number of times, in an infinite number of contexts, regardless of whatever may have happened before.

So the unique universe you and I grew up in, unthinking, has challengers now.  MWI has introduced the concept of an Omniverse, Lisa Randall et al. have sketched the outline of a true Multiverse, and finally, Aristotle gave us what is the functional equivalent of an Anti-verse. So yes, I have heard of the Multiverse…but so far, I’m not sold.

Keep the conversation going.

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