Are we swallowing other universes?
An unusual cosmological hypothesis was recently published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. At least, it's an idea I haven't heard before.
It suggests that our universe has been swallowing "baby universes," and that this eating habit is the cause of the observed accelerating rate of expansion of our universe.
The article, authored by researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, quickly veers off into mathematics that's incomprehensible to me. But I can extract a few interesting ideas. For instance, what if the initial "Big Bang" of our universe was caused by us (when we were still a baby universe) being swallowed by a larger universe?
And what would happen if, now that we're an adult universe, we collided with another adult universe? The researchers don't answer this question, but I'm guessing the outcome wouldn't be good.
More info: "Is the present acceleration of the Universe caused by merging with other universes?"
It suggests that our universe has been swallowing "baby universes," and that this eating habit is the cause of the observed accelerating rate of expansion of our universe.
The article, authored by researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, quickly veers off into mathematics that's incomprehensible to me. But I can extract a few interesting ideas. For instance, what if the initial "Big Bang" of our universe was caused by us (when we were still a baby universe) being swallowed by a larger universe?
the fact that the universe has expanded from, say, a Planckian size to 10−5m in a very short time, invites the suggestion that this expansion was caused by a collision with a larger universe, i.e. that it was really our Universe which was absorbed in another "parent" universe.
And what would happen if, now that we're an adult universe, we collided with another adult universe? The researchers don't answer this question, but I'm guessing the outcome wouldn't be good.
While a continuous absorption of microscopic baby universes probably can be accommodated in a non-disruptive way in our Universe, it is less clear what happens if the "baby" universe is not small, since we have not suggested an actual mechanism for such absorption.
More info: "Is the present acceleration of the Universe caused by merging with other universes?"
Comments
"Planckian size", I guess, is smaller than Max Planck (6'- something, iirc) but larger than Amedeo Avogadro.
Posted by Virtual in Carnate on 03/06/24 at 10:35 AM
So the universe is a cannibal? Actually, that explains a lot.
Posted by Phideaux on 03/06/24 at 02:46 PM
Hm. IYAM, this suffers from the same problem as panspermia: it just kicks the ball down the road. Somewhere, sometime, the first universe must have begun. And this doesn't explain that. It merely posits it, and then "explains" that we came from that earlier universe. That's not a scientific theory, that's a cop-out.
Posted by Richard Bos on 03/09/24 at 07:37 AM
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