By now, most everyone has been confronted with the concepts of extra dimensions, parallel universes, or alternate timelines that exist just beyond our experience. For decades, science fiction has conjured countless different versions of a deeper reality that we have yet to uncover. Many of these ideas have been presented for public consumption neatly wrapped in a story of human triumph over adversity. Almost none of these tales properly deals with the implications of other such realms existing, simultaneously or not, to our existence.
For most of recorded history, any notion that there is more than just this Universe we experience has been treated simply as a the product of human imagination. (I wish the general population would be more skeptical about other products of human imagination…) Yet, it is the empirical observations we make about the world that have caused the collective human intellect to take these notions seriously. Today, if you ask any of the most eminent theoretical physicists in the world, they would assure you that it is no fantasy and that we may very well live in what we call a Multiverse. Using the term Multiverse is simply to say that there may exist other universes beyond our own. Whether it be two or an infinite number, far from being speculation, the equations that define our natural world suggest that this may be so. Finding an inherent reason for our being on this planet shrinks ever more out of sight when our unfathomably ginormous Universe may be one of many unconceivable parallel universes. Not long ago, I was passing time letting my mind wander. I ended up thinking about the different possible Multiverses in which we may reside and the consequences if any were ever to be confirmed. At the end of my thought expedition, I came to wonder about the relationship between the Multiverse and my mortality. Or as the title states it, brain aneurysms and the Multiverse. Just so I could get to the point where I can tie the two together, I wrote the next few thousand words in support.
To help me attempt to explain the possible nature of hidden dimensions we turn to one of my favorite physicists and professor at MIT Max Tegmark. He has gone about and classified the possible Multiverses that are possible given the laws of physics as we know them and the depth of our understanding about those laws. Dr. Tegmark has determined that there are four classifications (others have grouped the possibilities differently) of possible Multiverses. Some can be inferred from a little bit of logic, some take at least a cursory knowledge of physics over the last half century. If you can bear with me, I would like to give a brief summary of his conclusions and then get back to an implication of one of them that I find that speaks to the beautiful cosmic joke in which humanity finds itself. I am drawing from Dr. Tegmark’s book Our Mathematical Universe for those who would like to learn more.
Our eminent physicist has designated the possible types of multiverse that may exist as Levels 1-4. Let us start with Level 1. The first type of Multiverse in which we may reside can be inferred from a couple simple thought experiments. Not long after ancient cultures developed the concept of infinity, there was a question of whether or not the Universe itself was infinite. Many monotheistic belief systems went out on a limb and asserted that it was so, chiefly as a reflection of God’s boundless nature. It was some time after the speculations of Middle Eastern religious scribes a Roman poet and philosopher in first century BCE named Lucretius came to settle the matter.
Little is known about the life of, or the majority of the work by, Lucretius. But in of the few works that remain entitled The Nature of the Universe, he settled the question using only the power of deduction. Imagine yourself as an archer, bow and arrow in hand, standing on a castle wall at the edge of the Universe. If you let loose from your bow over the edge and the arrow continues on, then clearly you are not at the edge of the Universe. Now, if you fire your arrow into the abyss and it bounces back, then you could infer that there is a wall outside the edge of the Universe preventing it from going any further. What might happen if you were able to then go stand on the newly discovered wall and fire another arrow? Profoundly, there are still only the two previous possible outcomes. Either your arrow continued on its path into an infinite Universe, or your arrow hits a wall that is on the outside of the edge of the Universe allowing you to repeat the same process all over again. Ad infinitum. This simple thought experiment suggests it is very likely that the Universe in which we reside has no boundary. We will skip how the shape of the Universe and a century of cosmological discovery also imply this very thing but I encourage some quality time on Wikipedia. The nature of our reality is an important matter.
It appears that when we look up at night sight we are staring off into infinity. In order to determine if we live in a Level 1 Multiverse, we also need to determine one more parameter: the number of atoms in our Universe. Luckily for us, some very smart people went ahead and gave us a rough estimate: 1082. In English that is the completely meaningless one hundred thousand quadrillion vigintillion. Now some of you may be skeptical of that number but the real question is whether or not there is a finite number of atoms. The answer is more obvious than at first glance. The Thin Blue Line is a romantic moniker for our atmosphere as seen from space. Just beyond the contours of our rocky planet, the sun illuminates the gases that allow life to flourish on Planet Earth. We all know that beyond that line is empty space. In empty space there are no atoms. If the Universe had an infinite number of atoms, there would be no Thin Blue Line. Space itself would be wall to wall protons, neutrons, and electrons.
So now we have a Universe that is both infinite and contains a finite number of atoms. From these two simple conclusions we can infer with one hundred percent likelihood that somewhere in our Universe there is another human being exactly like you. One living the nearly exact same life with minor details changed in an infinite number of ways. How so you may ask? Consider that there are fifty two cards in a playing deck. Fifty two is a finite number just like our one hundred bazailliony billion trillion billion number from before. If you were to shuffle the deck an infinite number of times, you must at some point reshuffle the deck into an order that has been dealt before. The same applies to the atoms in the Universe. If space is infinite, then the organization of atoms that make up who you are will inevitably be repeated. This is the Level 1 Multiverse.
Let us all take a second and have an air toast to our cosmic doppelganger’s. They know us better than they know themselves. The truly confounding implication is that any of these infinite twins of Planet Earth is resides in our Universe. It is an actual place that exists simultaneous to our existence. So theoretically you could just show up some day with your faster than light spaceship and play yourself in chess. These very possible notions completely dismantle all our preconceived notions and innate intuitions about the reality in which we inhabit. Far from being a special unique snowflake, there is a blizzard drizzling versions of yourself all over the Universe. Even though these possibilities are not tangible in our reality, they do change the context in which our reality resides.
At this point I should note that as the levels go up, my ability to pretend like I know what I am talking about will decrease. But as the old particle physics adage goes, “If you understand it, you have not understood it.” In spite of that, onto Level 2. The Inflation Theory of cosmic expansion is not as famous as the cosmic theory that preceded it, The Big Bang Theory, but the implications of its pending confirmation are even more far reaching. The infinitesimally small point before time began, before any expansion of the Universe, is known as the singularity. Inside this space, people like to say that the laws of physics break down. That is to say that the equations that make predictions about the orbits of stars and behaviour of quarks are insufficient to make predictions about the how matter and the four fundamental forces behave under these conditions. Probably the result of some zero in the denominator or something. The also more famous Theory of General Relativity, the theory of Einstein, gave us the concept of spacetime, predicted the expansion of our Universe (even though he rejected the idea), and predicted the existence of black holes. The equations that he worked out apply throughout the history of the Universe, from this very moment all the way back until about up until 10-32 seconds after the Big Bang. Man he was so close. Must of just eaten away at him. There is an incomprehensibly small gap between the known and the complete unknown where Inflation Theory comes into play.
The Cosmic Microwave Background created the need for Inflation Theory. Two physicists and their giant radio telescope stumbled into one of the biggest discoveries of the last century in upstate New Jersey in 1964. Plagued by a stubborn background signal, they tried everything they could to identify the culprit. After months of work they determined the signal was not the result of interference, human error, or even the bird droppings they scraped away themselves. What they found was that the signal was hitting their giant metal ear horn (look it up) with equal strength from every direction. It did not take long for them to realize that this was the signal from the birth of our Universe predicted by another set of great minds two decades prior. Below is a picture of this signal. It is helpful in explaining this next part but first I think it is entirely captivating. Staring so far back into the past activates the adrenal glands in my gut and leaves me with a disconcerted feeling that I quite like. This signal is the moment where the gravity holding everything so tightly together was overcome by the expansion of the Universe. The continued expansion after the Big Bang cooled the Universe over time until a point where protons and electrons could form hydrogen. At this moment the Universe became transparent. With the Universe no longer just a soup of unbound particles, light produced by atomic interactions was allowed to travel on without scattering off a sea of other particles. This is that moment.
One thing you may notice is the dispersal of the signal. There is no discernible pattern and it is not distributed evenly. This non uniform spread of energy went against what we knew about the behavior of particles at the time. Now, aaallllll of that just to get to where Inflation Theory and the Level 2 Universe come together. Inflation Theory attempts to explain this uneven distribution. It also predicts the existence of another field. A field just like the electromagnetic field, space time, or if you want to be hip with the times a Higgs field. It is in this field our Universe experienced an accelerated rate of expansion and a underwent a series of quantum fluctuations that evenly spread matter throughout the Universe and allowed for galaxies to form and yada yada yada. You know, something about all of creation. The multiverse can be inferred from all this in that if quantum fluctuations in a Inflation Field (yeah seriously that’s what they called it) happened to us, then it certainly must happen an infinite number of times in that same field. This Level 2 multiverse would be full of other places where the cosmological constants would be tweaked in every which way yielding Universes that would not resemble our own. The rules of our Universe remain but the manifestation of those rules would change. Many would fail to get off the ground. Most would never bring consciousness into existence. But by the sheer power of numbers here we are. We are a statistical likelihood. The equivalent of monkey’s banging on typewriters and producing Shakespeare.
There is a flip side to every coin of course. Though we may be the product of blind luck, how incredibly lucky we are to find ourselves in a Universe where conscious beings were bound to exist. There are 26 fundamental constants required to define our reality. Ascribing different values to some of them would drastically change the outcome a similar singularity event. Not only do we live on a Goldilocks planet but it appears that we also reside in a Goldilocks Universe.
Level 3 Multiverse is the one that will be familiar to most. The laws that govern this Multiverse allow for the alternate timeline scenario that we know from every movie and plot twist ever. The particles that make up who we are behave quite strangely at the quantum level… news flash. They have this funny property where they act as both a wave and a particle, hence the phrase wave particle duality. The particle itself travels along a wave function. I will let Dr. Tegmark do the rest “There is no known way to predict where in the wave any individual particle will be found. All that can be known are probabilities of it appearing at various locations within the wave. Bizarrely, once the position of the particle is observed, once it is measured, all trace of the overall wave instantly disappears, with only the particle remaining.”
He goes on, “According to the mathematics and our sensory data, we should see the particle in only one of the locations and we should see it only in the other one. No, the second “only” in the previous sentence is not a typo. We appear to have two realities in which we observe the particle. Prior to the measure, there was only one reality. After the measure, there are two. In multiverse parlance, the many worlds interpretation asserts that our universe is cloned every time what appears to be a wave function collapse happens. Given that this happens an uncountable number of times per second throughout the universe, and given the large range of possibilities for each particle’s position, the number of universes being created every second is sublime.”
Here we are in another Multiverse where every possible outcome is inevitable. One should not shy away from the implications. Alongside your one continuous timeline there have been an infinite number of timelines where the collapse of a wave function leads the untold number of particles to diverge and collapse in an infinite number of other ways. Your life in these foreign dimensions would range from ever so slightly different to complete bat shit insane different. There are constraints to the possible outcomes to your existence. For example, there isn’t a timeline where you were born at some other time in history. Only that one sperm and egg meeting at that one time can be you. But after conception all bets are off. In addition to all those possible timelines are the infinite number of other timelines where you never existed at all, or cease to exist at every moment…
A favorite cartoon secret agent of mine has a set of top five fears that serve as an excellent plot device. One of them is brain aneurysm. The lining of a blood vessel in your tissue fails and your brain is deprived of oxygen and filled with blood. Survival is dependent on your proximity to a surgeon. A silly cartoon and this possible Multiverse had me wondering if after every passing second, there is a version of me that just died of a brain aneurysm. An infinite number of you’s and I’s having a vein in the brain burst and those poor unfortunate saps are dead within minutes. Like right now. And now. And now, now, now. Blam, pow, caput… Yet I continue to write this sentence. If the collective mind of humanity can not solve this paradox and relieve us from this reality, we are left with nothing else than another cosmic joke. How could one give any special meaning to their own stream of consciousness while so many of our brothers and sisters lay fallen in alternate dimensions from a faulty blood vessel? Actually, pretty easily, knowing all that I still suffer from the delusion that I am special. Human nature is tough to shake.
We have reached Level 4. This category is for the Multiverses that we can not even conceive. Ones where not only are the implementation of the laws of the Universe changed, but the actual laws themselves are changed. One could speculate endlessly about what the laws of physics themselves being different could mean. For all we know it may be that the fundamental building blocks of matter in other Level 4 Universes could be made of syrupy pancakes. Or instead of the space time continuum you are stuck in Punxsutawney with Phil. The only reason that we even consider these possibilities is because of the bizarre (at least bizarre to us) nature of the only Universe we know to exist. Even then, we are not entirely sure we do not live in a computer simulation. Up until the last century everything seemed pretty straight forward in terms of our place in the Universe. Now we are faced with wormholes, infinite versions of ourselves, and quantum loop gravity.
Years of cultural indoctrination may leave you dismissive of my conclusions. To me the very fact that we even are discussing these as possibilities points to the absurd nature of existence. We may find the existence of parallel universes not to be true. We can be nice and cozy in our neatly packed single Universe. But this still doesn’t dispel the likelihood that the deck of cards has been shuffled all the possible ways and has repeated itself somewhere out there. Given what we have learned, it is lazy to offer platitudes like we were put on the Earth to find love or peace. After what we have discussed, suggesting that human beings have some cosmic purpose comes off as cheesy. Yet these are the prevailing mindsets of over 6 billion people.
I truly do believe the sooner we dispel with this notion that things happen for a reason we might just get to some sort of societal equilibrium. The Universe has been speaking loud and clear since time began and we have just picked up the frequency: existence is without reason. Ceasing to exist in a Universe with infinite timelines should diminish any motivation to end your existence prematurely for a human cause. When we fight for control of just one civilization in a trillion oceans of evolutionary successes, why die for this one?
I know deep down I wish it were not true. Our whole lives are built around the first person narrative where we are the protagonist in our tale of triumph over adversity. There may be some that wish we could return to a time with a little more ignorance. There are still very significant problems with the theories we use to define our reality. It may be that our humanity will always prevent us from seeing a clear picture of our reality. Yet, these theories have given us lasers and smart phones and if we utilize them to communicate on social media we can use them to ponder our cosmic circumstance. As for me, I prefer to know the truth. In a reality that dictates that our experience is just one of an infinite number, I will just be grateful for every moment until suddenly my eyes roll into the back of my head and for a brief moment, right before I cease to exist, I can lament how that goddamn confounding Multiverse had got me.
The Westerlund Project 