Is the
Universe a Bubble? Let’s Check
Perimeter Institute for
Theoretical Physics, July 16, 2014
Perimeter Associate Faculty
member Matthew Johnson and his colleagues are working to bring the multiverse
hypothesis, which to some sounds like a fanciful tale, firmly into the realm of
testable science.
Never mind the big
bang; in the beginning was the vacuum. The vacuum simmered with energy
(variously called dark energy, vacuum energy, the inflation field, or the Higgs
field). Like water in a pot, this high energy began to evaporate – bubbles
formed.
Each bubble contained
another vacuum, whose energy was lower, but still not nothing. This energy
drove the bubbles to expand. Inevitably, some bubbles bumped into each other.
It’s possible some produced secondary bubbles. Maybe the bubbles were rare and
far apart; maybe they were packed close as foam.
But here’s the thing:
each of these bubbles was a universe. In this picture, our universe is one
bubble in a frothy sea of bubble universes.
That’s the multiverse
hypothesis in a bubbly nutshell.
It’s not a bad story.
It is, as scientists say, physically motivated – not just made up, but rather
arising from what we think we know about cosmic inflation.
Cosmic inflation isn’t
universally accepted – most cyclical models of the universe reject the idea.
Nevertheless, inflation is a leading theory of the universe’s very early
development, and there is some observational evidence to support it.
Inflation holds that in
the instant after the big bang, the universe expanded rapidly – so rapidly that
an area of space once a nanometer square ended up more than a quarter-billion
light years across in just a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a
second. It’s an amazing idea, but it would explain some otherwise puzzling astrophysical observations.
Inflation is thought to
have been driven by an inflation field – which is vacuum energy by another
name. Once you postulate that the inflation field exists, it’s hard to avoid an
“in the beginning was the vacuum” kind of story. This is where the theory of
inflation becomes controversial – when it starts to postulate multiple
universes.
Proponents of the
multiverse theory argue that it’s the next logical step in the inflation story.
Detractors argue that it is not physics, but metaphysics – that it is not
science because it cannot be tested. After all, physics lives or dies by data
that can be gathered and predictions that can be checked.
That’s where Perimeter
Associate Faculty member Matthew Johnson (cross-appointed at York University) comes in.
Working with a small team that also includes Perimeter Faculty member Luis Lerhner,
Johnson is working to bring the multiverse hypothesis firmly into the realm of
testable science.
“That’s what this
research program is all about,” he says. “We’re trying to find out what the
testable predictions of this picture would be, and then going out and looking
for them.”
Specifically, Johnson
has been considering the rare cases in which our bubble universe might collide
with another bubble universe. He lays out the steps: “We simulate the whole
universe. We start with a multiverse that has two bubbles in it, we collide the
bubbles on a computer to figure out what happens, and then we stick a virtual
observer in various places and ask what that observer would see from there.”
Simulating the whole
universe – or more than one – seems like a tall order, but apparently that’s
not so.
“Simulating the
universe is easy,” says Johnson. Simulations, he explains, are not accounting
for every atom, every star, or every galaxy – in fact, they account for none of
them.
“We’re simulating
things only on the largest scales,” he says. “All I need is gravity and the
stuff that makes these bubbles up. We’re now at the point where if you have a favourite
model of the multiverse, I can stick it on a computer and tell you what you
should see.”
That’s a small step for
a computer simulation program, but a giant leap for the field of multiverse
cosmology. By producing testable predictions, the multiverse model has crossed
the line between appealing story and real science.
In fact, Johnson says,
the program has reached the point where it can rule out certain models of the
multiverse: “We’re now able to say that some models predict something that we
should be able to see, and since we don’t in fact see it, we can rule those
models out.”
For instance,
collisions of one bubble universe with another would leave what Johnson calls
“a disk on the sky” – a circular bruise in the cosmic microwave background.
That the search for such a disk has so far come up empty makes certain
collision-filled models less likely.
Meanwhile, the team is
at work figuring out what other kinds of evidence a bubble collision might
leave behind. It’s the first time, the team writes in their paper,
that anyone has produced a direct quantitative set of predictions for the
observable signatures of bubble collisions. And though none of those signatures
has so far been found, some of them are possible to look for.
The real significance
of this work is as a proof of principle: it shows that the multiverse can be
testable. In other words, if we are living in a bubble universe, we might
actually be able to tell.
-- Erin Bow
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