multiversal immersion
Limitless, expansive, infinite are just some of the adjectives modern science has used to describe the universe through time. Although the studies of Hawking and Hertog do not discard these notions of immensity from human existence, their discoveries do include borders. This is what the first said when revealing that “we predict that our universe, on the largest scales, is reasonably uniform and globally finite.”
This makes multiverses a real possibility, because each one would reside in its own space, or as some prefer to call it, a bubble. There are those who think that the number of spaces, and therefore of universes, is finite, and that it goes from three to seven. Others, however, think that it extends to infinity. More curious are the speculations about what each of them is like.
The multiverse is a concept we know tremendously little about.
The Hartle-Hawking theory opened the door to all kinds of universes. Some with planets inhabited by societies like ours, others lacking any type of celestial body and each of them governed by their own physical laws. Hawking-Hertog uses string theory to rule out the latter and ensure that all universes are governed in a similar way. “The laws of physics that we tested in our laboratories did not exist forever,” he explains. Hertog . “They crystallized after the Big Bang when the universe expanded and cooled. The kind of laws that emerge depends very much on the physical conditions at the Big Bang.”
Although of course, there are also alternative theories such as Max Tegmark who, supported by previous research, speculates about four possible multiverses. The first alternative is a space so infinite that it cannot exist without repeating itself, which would imply the existence of authentic doppelgängers somewhere in the cosmos. The second is similar, but with variations in physical laws. Not in each and every one of the universes, but only in a few, as if it were “bags of gas in a growing loaf of bread”.
The third possibility suggests ramifications that arise around individuals depending on the different decisions they make in life.. A popular idea in fiction, but with no solid scientific basis so far. The last and most challenging of all is the existence of parallel worlds outside our space-time, with such marked variations in their physical laws that they even had to be thought of geometrically or abstractly.
“The multiverse is a concept that we know tremendously little about,” concluded Doctor Strange in Spider-Man: No Way Home. But with the subject in vogue, it is a fact that the investigations will continue and that more conclusive results will not be long in coming. While this is happening, we can only dream, relying on franchises like Marvel and DC that invite us to expand the imagination around the possible alternate worlds that exist out there.