Post by Wayne Smith on Dec 8, 2020 11:07:39 GMT 10
“The Big Bang Didn’t Happen Just Once” –Four Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe
“There are things that we see about our universe that we can only explain – at least for the moment – if we postulate that there was an era very, very early in our universe’s history where space expanded extremely dramatically in a giant, sudden burst,” said Hooper about the era of so-called cosmic inflation when the universe expanded much faster than the speed of light – that lasted for a little over one millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. “These are bigger numbers than you can ever wrap your head around but you can just think of the universe growing almost instantly to a vast, vast volume from a tiny little space. If that’s true, and a lot of cosmologists think it is very likely to be true, then the Big Bang didn’t just happen once, but this inflating space in a sense pops off these kind of bubble universes one after the other.”
Infinite Number of Universes–Each Surrounded by an Impenetrable Cosmic Horizon
This expansion of space, driven by the unsolved mystery of dark energy, observes Hooper in The Edge of Time, “divides it into a number of causally disconnected region, each is a universe of its own surrounded by an impenetrable cosmic horizon, the size of which is determined by how fast space is expanding.
Infinity is such that with an infinite amount of space, there are an infinite number of universes — collections of atoms and other particles located at specific places at specific times oriented in almost exactly the same way that they are in our Earth world. Within an infinite space, suggests Hooper, there are inevitably an infinite number of universes that are indistinguishable from our own. Yet some of the regions within the multiverse are likely to be alien worlds with unknown forces and new forms of matter along with more or fewer than three dimensions of space –worlds utterly unlike anything we can imagine.
“These worlds contain a star that is nearly identical to the Sun, which is orbited by a planet that is nearly identical to the Earth, which contains upon it people who are nearly identical to you and me,” he writes. “If space as we know it extends forever, this conclusion is inevitable. All things and all events that are possible, no matter how unlikely, will exist and will occur within this greater collection of space.”
Think of the multiverse says Neil deGrasse Tyson, “as multiple ships at sea far enough away from one another so that their circular horizons do not intersect yet they all share the same body of water.”
