You know the idea of the multiverse by now (multiple versions of Spiderman in the MCU, Oscar darling Everything Everywhere All At Once, etc). While the idea of parallel universes originated in scientific circles, it remains highly controversial.
You live on this planet — and you’re of a certain age — there’s a decent chance you’ve seen the classicepisode “mirror, mirror,” in which Captain Kirk and several members of the enterprise find themselves in what appears to be a parallel universe.
The debate over the existence of unseen universes may seem rather pie-in-the-sky. After all, how could worlds that we can never visit — or even detect — possibly affect anyone’s life? But the stakes are higher than they appear: Critics caution that legitimizing the multiverse could make it harder for the public to distinguish science from speculation, making it more difficult to keep pseudoscience at bay.
But if inflation could blow up one bit of space-time, why not many bits of space-time? Why shouldn’t inflation be happening continuously, creating new universes all the time? There didn’t seem to be any way to constrain inflation so that it yielded just one universe — and so the notion of “eternal inflation” was born, and the idea of multiple universes with it.
Steinhardt points to another shortcoming of eternal inflation: The theory says nothing about what any one particular universe will be like. “The problem is, now you have a theory which makes no predictions,” he says. “For any property that you can imagine, the opposite of that property also occurs, an infinite number of times.” Hossenfelder is equally skeptical: “In eternal inflation, they say they have all these universes popping up.
This illustration shows the multiverse suggested by eternal inflation, where new universes are constantly forming .The multiverse controversy is rooted in the notion of testability. If we can’t interact with these other universes, or detect them in any way, some experts insist that relegates them to mere philosophical speculation.
To demonstrate the principle, consider an electron. According to quantum mechanics, an electron can spin in two different ways . Before you look at the electron, the theory says its spin is indeterminate; it can be in both states, spin-up and spin-down. But when you actually measure the electron’s spin, the wave function “collapses,” and the superposition goes away; you’re left with one spin or the other.
Max Tegmark, a physicist at MIT, expounded on the many worlds model in his 2014 book Our Mathematical Universe. Tegmark says he often thinks about the other copies of himself in those other worlds: “I feel a strong kinship with parallel Maxes, even though I never get to meet them,” he writes. “They share my values, my feelings, my memories — they’re closer to me than brothers.”
The way Hossenfelder sees it, having a basket of speculative theories is no better than having just one. In every case, we’re asked to believe in the existence of universes that we can never see or study in any way. “I’m not saying it’s wrong,” she says. “I’m just saying it’s no longer science.” Except, explains Siegfried, Ockham did not merely say that simpler is better. Rather, in devising an explanation, it’s desirable to use the fewest principles, even if they lead to complex results, Ockham argued. Not only that, Ockham was actually pro-multiverse. “Ockham himself was the biggest advocate for the multiverse,” Siegfried says. “He argued vigorously against all of Aristotle’s objections to having more than one universe.
Many worlds: An attempt to explain a key aspect of quantum mechanics, the many worlds theory says that the universe splits each time a quantum measurement is made. This leads to an ever-growing array of universes within a branching multiverse. The model suggests that this multiverse contains multiple copies of you, as well.The Multiverse on Screen
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