“I don’t quite understand you,” said the Engineer. - You are talking about an artificial universe. Can you do it? Close space and time around a particular mass? Are you kidding me? It's very difficult (Clifford Simak, Space Engineers).
Perhaps we are now racking our brains over the meaning of the fundamental physical constants and their relationship precisely because the designers of our Universe have chosen them so as to stimulate our curiosity and hint at their artificial origin.
Can a new universe be created? Or, in other words, is some supercivilization capable of performing an experiment that will end with the formation of a full-fledged daughter universe? At first glance, such a task looks not only insoluble, but also meaningless. An artificial universe should contain at least the same number of particles as the world where its creators live, but where to get so much energy? On the other hand, will it not happen that the newborn outer space will swallow and destroy the parent universe? The creation of a daughter universe, fraught with the risk of suicide of the mother-predecessor - what monstrous absurdity?
Fine balance
But don't jump to conclusions. The newly made universe must be endowed with gravity, which is known to have negative potential energy. This means that the sum of the gravitational energy and the positive energy of the newborn particles may turn out to be close to zero. Therefore, the young universe can be created with very moderate energy costs. And the danger of universal cannibalism can be avoided if the tiny embryo of the future universe is forced to expand for some time at a rapidly increasing rate. The growing "seed" universe at the expense of internal resources will form its own space and will soon go beyond the event horizon, forever disappearing from the field of vision of the civilization that gave birth to it.
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Test tube world
This scenario of laboratory creation of new worlds does not contradict some versions of inflationary cosmology. As is known, it postulates the possibility of "blowing out" universes from supermicroscopic fluctuations of special quantum fields - inflatons. Under proper conditions, such fluctuations entail an exponential growth in the geometrical dimensions of the embryo of the future universe, completed by the mass production of gamma quanta and other elementary particles. If these conditions are realized in an experiment, then in the laboratory it is possible to produce an embryo of a new universe.
According to the inflationary model proposed by Alan Guth in 1980, and further refined by Andrey Linde, Paul Steinhardt and Andreas Albrecht, approximately 10 ^ -36 seconds after the Big Bang, our Universe began to expand extremely rapidly (exponentially in time), in a time of about 10 ^ -34 seconds having increased its size by 1050 times. This stage is precisely called inflationary (inflation). The driving force behind inflation was the physical vacuum - the primary scalar field, which possessed negative pressure (that is, antigravity). Inflation continued until the moment when the intensity of this field decreased to a minimum. The quantum fluctuations of the field, when approaching the minimum, filled our Universe with particles, which continued its further, albeit much slower, expansion.
Moreover, its fundamental physical properties will depend on the combination of pressure, temperature and inflaton field intensity that the experimenters choose. In particular, they can create a world with the most favorable conditions for the emergence of intelligent life. Some cosmologists even admit that our own universe arose in this way.
Universe inherited
It must be admitted that such projects are truly the height of altruism, since the mother civilization will not be able to derive any benefit for itself, because from the spun-off universe it is impossible to obtain either energy, or mineral raw materials, or even information. So why waste energy and money on this? According to Stanford University professor Andrei Linde, who more than twenty years ago dealt with the problem of universal design, the only reasonable goal of such an enterprise is to transfer important information to future inhabitants of the new universe that can contribute to their intellectual and technological progress: “This is exactly what parents do when they leave their children inherit your life experience”.
News from the creators
How can such a message be conveyed? Even if some signs are applied to the shell of the future universe, the inflationary expansion will stretch them to gigantic proportions, and these symbols will become unreadable. But information can be encoded by the physical parameters of the future universe - for example, the ratios between the masses of elementary particles. “If I wanted to send a message to the inhabitants of the universe I created,” says Andrei Linde, “I would write it down in the local laws of physics. And in order to convey a long and meaningful message, I will have to make these laws complex enough. For example, care must be taken to ensure that the masses of the electron, proton and neutron are in non-trivial ratios, which will be a serious challenge for future physicists to solve. Therefore, it is possible that we, without knowing it,we are trying to decipher the encoded message from the superintelligent, but, of course, not the divine creators of our world. Indeed, why not?
Alexey Levin