Is the Universe Everything There Is? On 20th Century Science in Many Worlds

The Idea Festival, based in Louisville, Kentucky kicked off officially on Wednesday, September 21 at the Kentucky Performing Arts Center, located on a main drag of Louisville which is littered with art galleries, hotels and a restaurants. 

Speaker Suketu Bhavsar decided to take the audience to the fourth dimension and show us simplistically (if that's possible with a topic like this), what the impact of an infinite universe really is.

Albeit a scientist, Bhavsar has a unique right brain charisma on stage and often threw in humor as a way to lighten his somewhat heavy talk. "If the universe is everything there is, what is there to talk about?" he asks the audience. "Time, but time is relative," reminds Bhavsar. "And, space is relative."He shows us a few examples demonstrating how space has geometry that depends upon the density of the universe.

The whole universe is full of galaxies mostly with empty space in between and every one of these galaxies is moving away from us. The space in between those galaxies is actually what’s expanding. Space is stretching out between galaxies all the time.

The geometry of our universe is flat and this means that our universe is endless and it’s infinite. An infinite universe leads to the first and simplest kind of multiverse, he suggests. If we go far enough, then there could and would be another you elsewhere. In other words, everything is possible in an infinite universe.

He asks, “how far until there is a copy of the visible universe?” and refers to Brian Greene’s name for it: Quilted Multiverse.

In the early universe, the quantum field of the rapidly expanding space drops to a lower value in random regions. These regions are bubble universes. 

To give us an image of bubble universes, he asks us all to imagine that we have a room full of steam that goes forever and little droplets fall out of steam.

Regarding these bubbles and how they relate to each other:

• Each of these bubbles will continue to expand and have an infinite spatial galaxy.
• Each bubble universe has the potential to create daughter universes that inflate and become independent universes creating even more universes.

 

Another possibility is that not all the dimensions are curled up. In the Braneworld scenario, ours and many other 3-brane universes could be residing alongside each other and we wouldn’t know about it.

This moves us into Quantum mechanics, which is not deterministic like Newtonian mechanics he says. Quantum mechanics means that there are many arrays of things that could happen, allowing for many outcomes. AND, many things happening in multiple universes all at the same time.

Bhavsar challenges us to also read another book by Brian Greene: The Elegant Universe, and to contemplate the following questions:

Is this science? What is consciousness? What is time? Can we ever truly understand time? What is reality?