This story is a part of our Cosmic Perspective collection, through which we confront the staggering vastness of the cosmos and our place in it. Learn the remainder of the collection right here.

We expect our universe accommodates all the things that exists, has ever existed and can exist sooner or later. However this may not be the case: there are lots of methods different universes may exist.

One is that we may very well be a single a part of a department of infinite universes identified collectively because the multiverse. These universes may need appeared shortly after the massive bang, they could be hiding in additional dimensions or they might pop into existence at any time when a quantum property goes from a cloud of doable states to a single actuality.

Multiverse concepts gained scientific weight within the Eighties with the invention of inflation, a interval when the early universe out of the blue expanded. Inflation explains why the cosmos is so flat and clean, nevertheless it additionally predicts the creation of a large number of unbiased bubble universes.

Cyclic universes

But inflation is only one path to a multiverse, and it has its critics. Lately, many cosmologists have turned to options like cyclic universe theories, which say the universe is on an endless cycle between ballooning and compressing. These theories nonetheless invoke a number of universes, however at completely different instances.

“What I didn’t like about inflation was that there are only a few real predictions – you don’t get out rather more than you set in,” says Neil Turok, a physicist on the College of Edinburgh, UK, who…