Multiverse gets real with glimpse of big bang ripples?

Repulsive gravity

The BICEP2 team had spent three years analyzing CMB data, looking for a distinctive curling pattern called B-mode polarization. These swirls indicate that the light of the CMB has been twisted, or polarized, into specific curling alignments. In two papers published online on the BICEP project website, the team said they have high confidence the B-mode pattern is there, and that they can rule out alternative explanations such as dust in our own galaxy, distortions caused by the gravity of other galaxies and errors introduced by the telescope itself. That suggests the swirls could have been left only by the very first gravitational waves being stretched out by inflation.

And for some theorists, simply proving that inflation happened at all would be a sign of the multiverse.

"If inflation is there, the multiverse is there," said Andrei Linde of Stanford University in California, who is not on the BICEP2 team and is one of the originators of inflationary theory. "Each observation that brings better credence to inflation brings us closer to establishing that the multiverse is real." (Watch video of Linde being surprised with the news that primordial gravitational waves have been detected.)

Source

Was watching a documentary on Sci channel when this issue was brought up.

Apparently it has not been proven yet.

Any thoughts?

a reply to: Kashai
From your Link:

For now, physicists don't know how they might observe the multiverse and confirm that it exists. "But when the idea of inflation was proposed 30 years ago, it was a figment of theoretical imagination," says Marc Kamionkowski at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. "What I'm hoping is that with these results, other theorists out there will start to think deeply about the multiverse, so that 20 years from now we can have a press conference saying we've found evidence of it."

In the meantime, studying the properties of the swirls in the CMB might reveal details of what the cosmos was like just after its birth. The power and frequency of the waves seen by BICEP2 show that they were rippling through a particle soup with an energy of about 1016 gigaelectronvolts, or 10 trillion times the peak energy expected at the Large Hadron Collider. At such high energies, physicists expect that three of the four fundamental forces in physics – the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces – would be merged into one.

The detection is also the first whiff of quantum gravity, one of the thorniest puzzles in modern physics. Right now, theories of quantum mechanics can explain the behaviour of elementary particles and those three fundamental forces, but the equations fall apart when the fourth force, gravity, is added to the mix. Seeing gravitational waves in the CMB means that gravity is probably linked to a particle called the graviton, which in turn is governed by quantum mechanics. Finding these primordial waves won't tell us how quantum mechanics and gravity are unified, says Kamionkowski. "But it does tell us that gravity obeys quantum laws."

"For the first time, we're directly testing an aspect of quantum gravity," says Frank Wilczek at MIT. "We're seeing gravitons imprinted on the sky."

The more we learn the more we realize there is allot more to learn. S^F

I thought the Multiverse theory had been close to proven by the discovery of Dark Flow

They think it is another Universe pulling on these galaxies -

The dark flow is controversial because the distribution of matter in the observed universe cannot account for it. Its existence suggests that some structure beyond the visible universe -- outside our "horizon" -- is pulling on matter in our vicinity.

This baby is huge !

Which would mean we are but a blip on a radar requiring a quantum microscope just to detect. One universe is as common as a computer. One realty as common as a simulation. One life as common as a flash drive.

Don't figure.....

Wouldn't expanding universes, side by side, expanding into each other, eventually "pop" each other? Would we see it happen, or would it be happening at a glacier pace in our time scale.

I saw this news item posted in half a dozen universes, and it usually ends up in the hoax bin. In a few others the scientists win the Nobel Prize, and in one, and I don't want to go there, they never went into science and work in sales.

So if this multiverse theory turns out one day to be real then am I right in thinking its planet in solar system then solar system in galaxy then universe then uninerse in multiverse?

So there could literrealy be billions of universeseses like there are galaxies??

a reply to: fatpastyhead

Yes. There are as many universes as there are grains of sand in this universe (but don't take my word for it, I'm not an expert in this subject - although I have seen grains of sand).

a reply to: Aleister


Wow. We just keep getting smaller.

And this multiverse could again be part of something bigger?

a reply to: Aleister

In brane theory the concept is that each "verse" sits on a 3 dimensional membrane. Matter provides stability to the membrane. Absence of matter create instability. These instabilities cause the brane to start rippling and losing coherence. As it does this, the two branes touch and create a big bang. A sudden explosion of matter is created from the vast energies released in this event, providing stability to the brane.

Not the best explanation for how it works, but you get the idea.

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

Thanks for posting what seems like a concise explanation, I wish I could understand it better. I wonder if the fellow, can't recall his user name, the one who does all the informative vids overlayed on him playing a video game, has done a video on this topic. From what you say there is an easy way to visualize the theory, but have to get my heads wrapped around it. The Big Bangs are to balance the membranes of the universe? Whoops, must go, time for banging my head against the wall of logic and prevailing winds in a further attempt to understand the concept.

a reply to: Kashai

As much as the topic has interested me, the multi-verse is essentially a huge curveball into our entire scientific understanding of the last two centuries and takes us right back to the 'supernatural in the sense that it arguably lacks falsifiability.

We can never truly deduce the truth about the multi-verse, especially if we are completely dependent on analysing gravitational wave formations, and the fact of the matter is that we cannot verify any of this as an actual 'multi-verse' effect rather than an unknown rule linking the fundamental forces to a function of time or energy density.

I used to be excited about parallel universes and the 'multi-verse', but in all honesty over the last few years I have realised that the multi-verse is literally the ONLY answer scientists can provide to a lot of modern scientific problems without practically saying 'we have absolutely no idea'.

That's because the multi-verse has a magical property of switching between an infinite amount of universes and a finite amount of universes, depending on what 'problem' it's attempting to explain, and hence can serve as more of a statistical analysis cheat tool than a valid theory. At other times its a product of assuming infinite conditions.

We definitely need considerably more data about the universe before we jump to these conclusions.

I mean, I don't even get the mainstream theories anymore. How can inflation be a product of the multi-verse? You need inflating multi-verses in the first place to trigger consequent inflations - it's the same issue.

Our CMB is uniform so that means if the multi-verse shaped our universe, it was done fairly homogenously. How can this be possible? That would mean equal magnitudes and distributions of mass, with fairly equal expansion accelerations, across the entire board?

More questions - some potentially unanswerable. Definitely open to the idea however, as it is something I naturally started to ponder about the world at an earlier age. At the moment however, it simply causes headaches.

For all we know, the big bang could still be exploding, and this 13 billion or trillion guess-timate universe could be as old as an instant and where living in some instant of that explosion. Like the whole universe was dreamt up by some dreamer and is over as soon as that dreamer wakes up.

Isn't the end of of the universe supposed be at the hands of a universal cooldown instead of some hellish explosion across space? Where galaxies expand to far from one another and can't feed of the gases of other galaxies, or where all the gases are just burn't out like it was oil on Earth?

originally posted by: SpecimenLike the whole universe was dreamt up by some dreamer and is over as soon as that dreamer wakes up.

Good concept. Imagine how much fun the universe is during the time the dreamer is in R.E.M. sleep.

I consider the potential of the big bang being an explosion of space/time and that matter is a packet of space/time, that has curved into itself. To me when matter enters the Singularity of a Black Hole it is possible that it ends up as part of some other order of space/time that has curved into itself, as in the known Universe.

Which sounds right in relation to the issue of infinite density and zero mass in relation to the Physics of this Boundless but Finite Universe.

In context we know that planets, stars and on cause space/time to curve towards them.

So what does the entire mass of our 40 billion light year sphere doing to what space/time, is in its reach as a whole?

Any thoughts?

originally posted by: fatpastyhead
a reply to: Aleister


Wow. We just keep getting smaller.

And this multiverse could again be part of something bigger?

Makes you wonder how small we actually are in all things. We may be too small to ever understand existence of everything or even recognize what everything is. We may just be what makes up the equivalent of quantum particles in a much, much larger "thing".

a reply to: Xeven

Instead of being a cog or part in some grand machine we are more like a voice in a chorus.

As in particle/wave and a crescendo.

a reply to: 727Sky

The Universe is expanding into some kind of space/time and so I ask what is happening, with the space/time? It is expanding into at the moment, the 40 billion light year spherical object, expands into that space/time?

From the frame of this very moment.

Any thought?

originally posted by: Kashai
Apparently it has not been proven yet.

That's the understatement of the year. Your source from March is too old because in June the researchers amended their paper to say what they found may just be dust, and many scientists believe that's the most likely explanation:

BICEP and Keck Array

on 19 June 2014, lowered confidence in confirming the cosmic inflation findings was reported; the accepted and reviewed version of the discovery paper contains an appendix discussing the possible production of the signal by dust. In part because the large value of the tensor to scalar ratio, which contradicts limits from the Planck data, this is considered the most likely explanation for the detected signal by many scientists.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Yes I did read that several scientist were at odds this but if there were no gravitational waves, formed during the big bang? There is something that is seriously wrong with the idea that the event was an explosion, under the circumstances.

If anything our home seems to be expanding faster and with a life span of a googolplex there must be ample space/time for it to expand into.

Multiverse theory says yeah their is plenty of space/time to expand into.

Any thought?

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Leonard Susskind's arguments with Stephen Hawking's in relation to information, appear relevant here.

Just speculating; but in order to enter this place that is about 40 billion light years wide one would need the means to enter it by exiting a black hole.

Further, that the mass of this Home as a whole, needs a serious assessment
as to what exactly is happening just outside it.

Any thoughts?