Quote:
Originally Posted by CraigS
Yep you guys are right ... this is/was actually the Multiverse story. It appears that Alan Guth may align with this one also - "The big bang of the universe is actually similar to cell division in biology, since new universes are continuously formed. However, inflation always wipes out the circumstances of the beginning of the particular universe." -Wiki.
Perhaps this paper's findings are directed at Guth himself !! - Blasphemy !!
I'm shocked !!
Cheers |
Except the voids I'm talking about here are not new universes, even if they lie outside of our event horizon, they are voids within the universe itself. Remember, what we call the "universe" is not the whole universe. It's just a small section of it that we can see inside our horizon bubble. Inflation has expanded the total universe to a size enormously larger than what we can see. The Multiverse concept, that was formulated by Hugh Everret back in the 60's, is different. They are separate spacetimes that have expanded along with or budded off our universe. They're essentially separate universe that we cannot observe because their structure lies outside of our spacetime. All of the universes, including our own, "figuratively expand" within an even larger space, a superspace (space of spaces, if you will) that is a higher dimensional state than the universe that we would experience. However, the spacetime that we experience is cutoff at a macroscopic level from these higher dimensions. To us, these dimensions are "rolled" up into points smaller than a proton (actually, they're around the Planck Length in size, at least as we "see" them) but they occupy every point in our space. Think of it like this, using the old balloon analogy...if the 4D (3 spatial and 1 time dimension) space we experience is the surface of that balloon, then the rest of the other dimensions are the interior of the balloon (as well as everything exterior to the balloon). Underlying all of space are these other dimensions, but they lie outside of our spacetime. They appear small to us, exceedingly so, but in actual fact their total volume is infinitely larger than what we see. Our universe is just the frothy flotsam on the surface of the sea, so to speak.
It's awkward to visualise. Technically, we aren't expanding into anything, as we see it, because it is space itself which is expanding. However, if you were to look at it from a higher dimensional perspective, we are both expanding out of, and into, the higher dimensional space simultaneously. Try getting you head around that