• Question: Are there other universes?

    Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Laurence Perreault Levasseur

      Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      The short answer is that we don’t know.

      There are some theories that explain how that would be possible, but so far no one knows if they are correct, or even how realistic they are.
      I explain one of those here, if you want more details:
      /energyj14-zone/2014/06/17/do-you-believe-in-the-theory-of-our-universe-in-a-bubble-of-another-universe-or-do-you-think-that-this-universe-just/

      These theories have some problems to them, though. Since most likely to test them we’d have to go (or get information about thongs) outside of our observable Universe, and since it’s impossible, it doesn’t yet make any testable prediction. This means that many scientists think they are not scientific theories, because they cannot be falsified by experiment.

    • Photo: Greig Cowan

      Greig Cowan answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Some people think there might be an infinite number of universes, but to be honest, we don’t really know. It might be the case that if there are many other Universes, when two of them collide you get another big bang…

    • Photo: Aimee Hopper

      Aimee Hopper answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      We’ll never know! We can only experience our universe because what we can see is limited by the speed light can travel, and what we can see is though to only be a small part of our own universe. So unless we can travel faster than light, we can’t find out 🙁

    • Photo: Dave Jones

      Dave Jones answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      Just like the other guys said, we just don’t know. There are theories that suggest there should be, but we can never test them because our Universe is all that we can see!

Comments

  • Photo: Laurence

    Laurence commented on :

    Hi Greig! In the multiverse theory, when two ‘bubble Universes’ collide, what you get is a (circular) patch in the CMB (that’s the Cosmic Microwave Background, basically a relic of the very beginning of the Universe, when it was insanely hot and dense, it is sometimes called the ‘afterglow of the Big Bang’) that’s slightly hotter OR slightly colder than the rest. But I believe that the recent Planck data (the most recent satellite mission to measure the CMB) puts very strong constraints on this happening at all… so that possibility is basically ruled out according to most people.
    If you are thinking about the cyclic Universe or the Ekpyrotic model, where 2 ‘universes’ (technically these are 3D branes) collide, there is no Big Bang is that model, it’s precisely the point of it, to avoid the Big Bang singularity!