One’s gotta hand it to the BBC’s Jason Palmer for finding an exotic yarn to take our minds exceedingly far away and a long time ago and off an Arab spring turning into a long hot summer, a Euro zone about to implode, Constitutional cultism amok in America, and the baffling immunity of internet commerce to a national sales tax. He has a story on multiverses with a picture of where, maybe but probably not but it looks like it might not be noise, the edge of our bubble-verse bears three oval regions, the kiss marks or butt-impressions or something where an alternate reality might have smacked our cosmos.
It is interesting, even if Palmer concedes in his text that nothing so far reaches the usual bar for scientifically polite statistical significance. A theoretical physics and particle physics team, mostly in the UK, has a paper accepted on the topic at the journal Physical Review D. Palmer links to the abstract there. A quick search reveals it, to no surprise, in its preprint entirety at the arXiv server for papers too good, in their authors’ opinions, to not share right away. Both are below in Grist. The paper runs 40 pages, with a great deal of understandable discussion and some mathematics that are far beyond most of us. It talks a lot about posteriors, which I did hope meant buttocks bumping our universe, but appears to have something to do with a posteriori.
Okay, enough rambling. The news is about a hope that the multiverse hypothesis (aka eternal inflation) is testable. If this universe of ours, during its brief inflationary epoch soon after time zero, were to have been merely one among infinite bubble-verses budding from one another, it is suspected possible that just about the time we turned normal other bubbles’ bubbles may have bloomed so close to the edge of ours that they left impressions, like bruises, sets of circular ripples such as where a fish rose and is gone but left its aquatic sign on the surface where we in the subaerial world can see it. So it seems. I may have rendered it wrong. More important is the new Planck Telescope that the European Space Agency orbited two years ago. It may have the resolution to see clearly the encounters’ marks in the speckles of the microwave background radiation that paints the most distant sky. The telescope is bobbing along not far from Earth in the L2 Lagrangian gravity well. That is a little eery in itself. Presumably in the works is a request to the telescope’s observing committee for time to pursue those data.
In the meantime, the team ran hours worth of computer time on the microwave chart, or WMAP, assembled by users of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe years ago. With a lot of Bayesian monkey business sees suggestive but not conclusive signs that such marks are there. Which means they are encouraged.
The general idea has gotten previous media attention. One unanswered question pertains to Palmer’s reference to outside bubbles hitting our own. That implies a border to our universe. Many readers will recall learning that the universe has no edge. Can collisions occur between things with no boundaries? Some remark acknowledging the paradox, perhaps even resolving it, would help.
Cosmos – Diana Steele (May 23, 2008) : Cosmic Collisions ;
Grist for the Mill: Physical Review D abstract ; arXiv First Observational Tests of Eternal Inflation: Analysis Methods and WMAP 7-year Results ;
– Charlie Petit
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