One of the most fascinating discoveries of our new century may be imminent if the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva produces nano-blackholes when it goes live again.
According to the best current physics, such nano blackholes could not be produced with the energy levels the LHC can generate, but could only come into being if a parallel universe were providing extra gravitational input.
Versions of multiverse theory suggest that there is at least one other universe very close to our own, perhaps only a millimeter away. This makes it possible that some of the effects, especially gravity, "leak through," which could be responsible for the production of dark energy and dark matter that make up 96% of the universe.
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/01/deep-thought-beyond-the-large-hadron-collider.html
The New StarGate?
Martin Rees on the multiverse- see also What we still don't know series on
google video.
Can you define what you mean by different universes? What are the possible types that have been conceived?
Several theorists have speculated on different lines. There's the concept of 'eternal inflation' due to Linde and others, in which big bangs recur repeatedly in an ever-expanding substratum. Some theorists have conjectured that new 'big bangs' could sprout inside black holes. And there is the idea that there could be a 4th spatial dimension, so that other universes could exist just a few millimeters away from us in a dimension we can't penetrate (since we are 'imprisoned' in three spatial dimensions). There is also the rather different idea of 'parallel worlds' which some people believe offers the best interpretation of quantum mechanics. Even if other universes existed, we would still need to ask whether they are replicas of ours, or if different laws could govern them.
Do you think we might ever be able to observe other universes in some kind of detail if they exist?
Some variants would allow a gravitational interaction with other 3-dimensional spaces; but other ideas suggest that they could be completely unobservable. Even in the latter case, we might still come to have confidence in the existence of 'other universes' if they were a consequence of a theory that gained credibility by accounting for things that we can observe. By analogy, we already believe in (unobservable) quarks within atoms because they help us to explain aspects of particle physics that would otherwise be mysterious. I'd like to add a semantic point. We should really, of course, use the word 'universe' for 'everything there is', If there's really a multiverse, we'd then need a new word (e.g. metagalaxy) for what astronomers traditionally call 'our universe'. But for the moment, while the whole idea remains conjectural, I think it's best to stick to the usual definition of 'the universe', even though this necessitates a new word 'the multiverse' for the grand ensemble that would make up the entire cosmos.
Might there not be universes that were even better for our kind of life? What might they be like?
There could be universes governed by a 'richer' set of laws that allowed even greater complexity than ours -- but obviously our brains couldn't readily conceive of these. Indeed we can't conceive of all the complexity that could emerge within our own universe during its (perhaps infinite) future evolution.
You write about the possibility that reality is so vast that exact duplicates would have to exist. Isn't this more like science fiction than real science?
http://www.space.com/spacelibrary/books/library_rees_020104.html
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