The universe is mysterious, and the more science learns about it, the more amazing it appears. The first reaction to theories like those presented here may be laughter. But what could be stranger than what we already know?
1. Everything around - "Matrix"
Many watched the film where the hero Keanu Reeves is amazed to learn that the whole world around him is "The Matrix", that is, something like a ghetto created for people by a computer superintelligence. Of course, this is fantastic, but there were scientists who are ready to take this idea seriously.
British philosopher Nick Bostrom suggested that our whole life is just an extremely complex game, reminiscent of The Sims: the development of the video game industry can lead to the ability to construct their own models of the world around them, and everyone can live forever in a separate virtual reality. If everything goes to this, there is no guarantee that our world is not a code written by an unknown programmer, whose capabilities are significantly higher than human ones.
Silas Bean, a physicist at the University of Bonn in Germany, looked at it from a different angle: if everything around is a computer image, then there must be some line behind which you can distinguish the "pixels" that make up everything. Bean considers such a boundary to be the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit: without going into scientific subtleties, we can only say that the German physicist sees in it one of the proofs that we live in an artificially created program, and is making new attempts to discover the computer on which it is installed.
2. Each of us has a "double"
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Surely you know such a popular adventure story - there is a nightmare world where everyone has an "evil" alter-ego, and every good hero must sooner or later fight with him and gain the upper hand.
This theory is based on the fact that the surrounding world is an infinite number of combinations of one set of particles, something like a room with children and a huge Lego set: with a certain degree of probability they can put together the same thing from blocks, only in a different way. It is the same with us - perhaps our exact copy was born somewhere.
3. A collision of worlds may occur
There may be many others outside our world, and nothing excludes the possibility of their collision with our reality.
Californian physicist Anthony Aguirre describes it as a giant mirror falling from the sky, in which we will see our own frightened faces if we have time to understand what is happening, and Alex Vilenkin and his colleagues from Tufts University, USA, are confident that they have found traces of such a collision.
Background radiation is a weak electromagnetic background that penetrates the entire outer space, all calculations show that it should be uniform, but there are places where the signal level is higher or lower than usual. Vilenkin believes that this is precisely what the residual phenomena of the collision of two worlds are.
4. The universe is a huge computer
It's one thing to assume that everything is a video game, and quite another to say that the universe is a huge supercomputer. Such a theory exists, and, according to it, galaxies, stars and black holes are components of a huge computing machine.
The Oxford professor of quantum informatics Vlatko Vedral became the apologist of the theory: he considers the basic building blocks of which everything is built, not particles of matter, but bits - the same units of information with which ordinary computers work. Each bit can contain one of two values: "1" or "0"; "Yes" or "no" - the professor is convinced that even subatomic particles consist of trillions of such values, and the interaction of matter occurs when many bits transmit these values to each other.
The same point of view is shared by Seth Lloyd, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: he implemented the world's first quantum computer, using atoms and electrons instead of microchips. Lloyd suggests that the universe is constantly adjusting the dynamics of its own development.
5. We live inside a black hole
You, of course, know something about black holes - for example, that they have such an attraction and density that even light cannot get out of there, but it hardly occurred to you that we are currently in one of them.
But it occurred to a scientist from Indiana University, Doctor of Theoretical Physics Nikodem Poplavsky: he argues that, hypothetically, our world could have been swallowed up by a black hole, and as a result we ended up in a new Universe - after all, it is still not really known what happens to objects caught in such a giant "funnel".
Physicist's calculations suggest that the passage of matter through a black hole can be analogous to the Big Bang and lead to the formation of another reality. Compression of space, on the one hand, can lead to expansion, on the other, it means that every black hole is a potential "door" leading to something not yet explored.
6. Humanity is affected by the effect of "bullet time"
Surely many people remember the scenes in the movie when a flying bullet or falling glass suddenly freezes, and the camera shows us this object from all sides. Something similar may be happening to us.
The Big Bang took place about 14 billion years ago, but the rate of expansion of the Universe, contrary to physical laws, is still increasing, although the force of gravity, it would seem, should slow down this process. Why is this happening? Most physicists claim "antigravity", which actually pushes galaxies away from each other, but employees of two Spanish universities have developed an alternative theory: not the universe is accelerating, but time is gradually slowing down.
This theory can explain why galaxies move faster and faster for us - the light went on for so long that we see not their current state, but the distant past. If the Spanish scientists are right, there may be a moment in the future when, for a hypothetical “outside observer,” our time practically stops.