Astronomy - September 2015

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380,000 years

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30 ASTRONOMY • SEPTEMBER 2015

After we accept the frustration of never knowing any-

thing about those gazillion galaxies, stars, and planets, noth-

ing’s particularly weird about the situation. Some simply

label that vast realm the “rest-o-universe.” It’s simple: There’s

them and us. Almost all astronomers are on board that ship.

The modern multiverse

Things get controversial and downright bizarre when we

examine the main multiverse hypotheses, the ones that have

intrigued the public for over a decade. Their champions are

well-known theorists and science popularizers like Stephen

Hawking, Michio Kaku, Brian Greene, and Tegmark.

MIT’s Alan Guth created the original inf lation theory

in 1979 to describe our universe’s rapid expansion in its

first few fractions of an instant. He supports a revised ver-

sion originated by Stanford theorist Andrei Linde called

chaotic inf lation.

This says that as the cosmos wildly and forever

increases in size, various inf lating parts of space form.

Each belongs to the same universe but grows so large that

inhabitants will never know what happens in any other

parts of the universe. “In some of these parts, laws of phys-

ics may be realized in different ways,” says Linde. “Thus,

one may say that our universe in effect becomes a multi-

verse, a huge eternally growing fractal consisting of many

different ‘universes’ with different properties.”

No one can ever traverse the space between these bub-

bles, one of which is our cosmos. Thus we have an infini-

tude of separate universes.

Guth and Linde shared the $1 million 2014 Kavli Prize

in Astrophysics with fellow founder Alexei Starobinsky for

their inf lation work. They even met President Obama.

LIGHT AND MATTER

ARE COUPLED

Dark matter clumps and forms a

cosmic web structure.

LIGHT AND MATTER

SEPARATE

Protons and electrons form atoms.

Light travels freely to become the

cosmic microwave background.

BEGINNING
OF THE
UNIVERSE

INFLATION

Our universe sees an

accelerated expansion.

LIGHT AND

MATTER FORMS

OUR COSMIC HISTORY

THE MODERN

MULTIVERSE