Increasingly, in the theoretical works of cosmologists, our Universe, as in mirrors, is reflected in an innumerable swarm of similar ones. Parallel Universes are multiplying to infinity. The worlds of our counterparts, which in other existences succumb to all the temptations that we have abandoned - and vice versa. Universes that are not similar to ours in everything: with completely different laws of nature and physical constants, with time flowing in a different direction, with particles rushing at superluminal speed.
“The idea of parallel universes seemed to scientists very suspicious - such a refuge for esotericists, dreamers and charlatans. Any physicist who decided to talk about parallel universes immediately turned into an object of ridicule in the eyes of colleagues and risked his career, because even now there is not the slightest experimental confirmation of their correctness.
But over time, the attitude towards this problem has changed dramatically, and the best minds are persistently trying to solve it,”says Michio Kaku, a professor at New York University, author of Parallel Universes.
The collection of Universes has already received its name: Multiverse, Multiverse. Serious scientific books are increasingly devoted to it. The author of one of them, "The Universe Next Door", astrophysicist from Britain Marcus Chaun wrote: “Our Universe is not one and only Universe, but only one in an endless series of others, bubbling in the river of time, like bubbles of foam. There, beyond the most distant boundaries of the universe, visible through a telescope, there are Universes that are ready to correspond to all conceivable mathematical formulas."
Max Tegmark, author of the research "Parallel Universes", stated: "Nature tells us in various ways that our Universe is only one among many other Universes … At this time we are not yet able to see how these parts add up to one gigantic picture … Of course, many ordinary people find this idea crazy, and so do many scientists. But this is an emotional reaction. People simply do not like all this rubbish of lifeless universe."
The most authoritative physicists of our time do not remain aloof from this obsession. For example, a professor at the University of Cambridge, Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal of Great Britain, is sure: “What we used to call the“Universum”, in reality, can be only one single link in the whole ensemble. The existence of countless other Universes is quite acceptable, where the laws of nature look completely different. The universe, in which we emerged, is included in an unusual subset, where the origin of consciousness is allowed."
Ideas of this kind fit into the modern ideas of physicists and astronomers. So, our Universe was born 13.7 billion years ago as a result of the Big Bang. Nothing suggests that this was a unique, one-off event. Such explosions could occur an infinite number of times, invariably giving rise to another alien universe. They, like pieces of a puzzle, make up one picture of the "World-as-a-Whole" - Multiverse.
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This idea is fraught with strange conclusions. “We are haunted by the same obsessive picture,” the American physicist Frank Wilczek said ironically, “we see an infinite number of our own copies, which almost do not differ from each other and which lead their parallel life. And every moment more and more of our doubles appear, who live the most different versions of our own future."
Generally speaking, this kind of picture goes back to the idea of the American physicist Hugh Everett, outlined more than half a century ago, in 1957. He interpreted the quantum theory as follows: he assumed that every time, as soon as we have to make a choice between several possible states, our universe splits on several parallel Universes, very similar to each other. So there is a universe in which I will meet Elena tonight. There is a universe where the meeting will not take place. And henceforth, each of them will develop in its own way. So my private life is really only a special case of a great many destinies that I and all my doubles will have to live summa summarum.
At the same time, Everett's idea is also a brilliant way to resolve the inevitable paradoxes that arise when we talk about the "time machine." What if its inventor, having gone back in time, suddenly falls into wild melancholy and decides to commit suicide? He will die in a distant youth; he will not invent a car flying through the distant times; he will not return to his youth; he will not kill himself; he will live a long time, engaging in technical creativity; he will invent a time machine; he will return to the past, kill himself; he will die in his distant youth … You slide along this logical chain, as if on a Mobius strip, not knowing where you went from the front side to the back.
1991 - The knot of this paradox was cut by David Deutsch of Oxford University. You can really travel into the past - and even with a pistol in hand - but every time we go into the past, we find ourselves not in our Universe, where we have not seen or heard any guests from the future, but in an alternative Universe. which is born as soon as the time machine lands. In our world, the framework of cause-and-effect relationships is unshakable.
“An object travels from a certain time, flowing in a certain world, and ends up in another time and another world. But no object is capable of being transported to the past epoch of the same world”- this is how this experience of travel in time can be formulated, which was transformed into a journey into parallel space. The aphorism of Maurice Maeterlinck “If Judas starts on a journey today, this path will lead him to Judas” did not stand the test of cosmological views. A person who has gone into the past to meet himself finds only his double in someone else's past.
Is it strange? "Everett's interpretation is an inevitable conclusion that should be drawn if we consider quantum theory as a universal doctrine, applicable always and everywhere," - many physicists would agree with this reasoning. Others are already engaged in mapping the universe, which can accommodate not one, but an infinite set of universes.
We, unique and unrepeatable people, are multiplying like copies of films on DVDs disassembled in different apartments. And if at this minute disc No. 3234 is gathering dust in the box, then someone puts disc No. 3235 into the player, and someone takes out disc No. 3236 to put it in exactly the same box, and disc No. … In general, with everything that can happen happens with them.
Is it possible to visit a parallel universe?
When scientists talk about parallel Universes, they most often talk about various subjects: about distant regions of the universe, between which lie "superluminal" - inflationary - gaps, about a series of worlds that still branch off from our Universe, about the faces of the N-dimensional universe, one of which it forms the familiar space.
According to some scenarios, the energy density of the vacuum can sometimes change spontaneously in such a way that this leads to the birth of a "daughter Universe". Such Universes are scattered across the Multiverse, like soap bubbles blown out by a child. According to other scenarios, new universes are born in the depths of black holes.
Critics consider the very hypothesis of the Multiverse to be speculative. It cannot be truly substantiated or proven. Other Universes are not available for observation; we cannot see them with our own eyes, just as we do not see yesterday or tomorrow. So, is it possible, based on the known physical laws or facts, to describe what lies beyond the horizon of the universe? It would be presumptuous to assert that “there is no moon until no one sees it,” that there are no other worlds since they cannot be seen. Is it worth rejecting this "speculative fantasy" if any attempt to describe what lies outside our world is fantastic in its own way?
We have to deal only with a theoretical foundation on which nothing of practical value can be built. As for extravagance, the quantum theory, in the opinion of an outside observer, is no less fantastic than a conversation about an endless multitude of Universes.
Gradually, the principle was established in physics: "Everything that is not forbidden will inevitably come true." In this case, the right of the next move is transferred to the opponents. It is up to them to prove the impossibility of one or another hypothesis, and it is up to the enthusiasts to propose them. So the part of the critics is to convince that none of the many Universes has the right to exist on any parsec of n-dimensionality. And if they could handle the proof, it would be pretty weird. "If there was only one of our Universe," writes British cosmologist Dennis William Schiama, "it would be difficult to explain why there is no place for many other Universes, while this one is still available."
With the advent of the idea of "multiple universes", the Copernican revolution, which began 5 centuries ago, is coming to its logical conclusion. “At first, people believed that the Earth was at the center of the Universe,” writes Alexander Vilenkin. - Then it became clear that the Earth occupies approximately the same place as other planets. It was hard to come to terms with the fact that we are not unique."
First, the Earth was expelled from the center of the universe, then our Galaxy turned out to be one of the small islands in space, and now the space has multiplied like a grain of sand in an endless suite of mirrors. The horizons of the universe have expanded - in all directions, in all dimensions! Infinity has become a natural reality in physics, an immutable property of the world.
So, somewhere in the distance other universes are hiding. Is it possible to reach them? Perhaps, in science fiction, the time has come to change the "time machines", which have already managed to fly around the worlds of the Past and the Future, to "space machines" that will rush through our stellar worlds into an unknown distance of transcendental geometry. What do scientists think about this?
2005 - The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics honored Austrian physicist Walter Drescher and his German colleague Joachim Heuser in the category "flight of the future". If the ideas they proposed are correct, then the Moon can be reached in a few minutes, Mars - in two and a half hours, but 80 days is enough not only to circumnavigate the Earth, but also to travel to a star that lies ten light years away from us. Such proposals simply cannot but appear - otherwise astronautics will come to a dead end. There is no other choice: either we will fly to the stars someday, or space voyages are absolutely pointless, like trying to go around the globe, jumping on one leg.
What is the basis of the idea of Drescher and Heuser? Half a century ago, the German scientist Burkhard Heim tried to reconcile two of the most important theories of modern physics: quantum mechanics and general relativity.
At one time, Einstein showed that space in the vicinity of planets or stars is strongly curved, and time flows more slowly than far from them. This is difficult to verify, but easy to explain with a metaphor. Space can be likened to a tightly stretched rubber sheet, and celestial bodies are a scattering of metal balls monotonously circling over it. The more massive the ball, the deeper the depression under it. Gravity, Einstein said, is spatial geometry, a visible distortion of space-time.
Heim brought his idea to its logical conclusion, making the assumption that other fundamental interactions are also generated by the characteristics of the space in which we live - and we, according to Heim, live in six-dimensional space (including time).
His followers, Drescher and Heuser, brought the number of dimensions of our universe to eight and even described how one can penetrate the boundaries of the dimensions we are accustomed to (here it is, "the flight of the future"!).
Their model of "space machine" is as follows: a rotating ring and a powerful magnetic field of a certain configuration. As the speed of rotation of the ring increases, the spaceship located here seems to dissolve in the air, becomes invisible (those who watched the film "Contact" based on the novel by Carl Sagan remember well the scene when the spherical ship, madly spinning in place, disappeared behind a curtain fog - transported to the "wormhole tunnel").
So the starship of Drescher and Heuser also escaped into another dimension, where, according to the hypothesis of scientists, physical constants, including the speed of light, can take on a completely different meaning, for example, much more. Having rushed along another's dimension - across the "parallel Universe" - with superluminal (in our opinion) speed, the ship instantly declared itself at the target, be it the Moon, Mars or a star.
The authors of the work honestly write that "this project contains flaws" and "mathematically flawed", in particular, it is not entirely clear how a ship penetrates into a parallel Universe, and even more so it gets out of it. Modern technology is not capable of this. And in general, the proposed theory, it is said in the commentary of the journal "New Scientist", is difficult to link with modern physics, but it is perhaps a rather promising direction.
What if our like-minded people in one of the parallel worlds think the same way and maybe even try to penetrate us?
Recommended for viewing: "Parallel universes and multiverse, the theory of multiple worlds and space connections of the Universe"
A. Volkov