The Concept of the Megaverse

Everyone is well aware that they live on a small blue-green planet which goes around an average star which orbits an average galaxy which is one of billions and billions of galaxies that collectively make up our Universe. Is that all there is? Well, you may have heard of the Multiverse concept – a collection of Universes. Then too you are probably familiar with Mirror or Parallel Universes, even if just from watching or reading sci-fi. I’ll use an analogy here we’re all familiar with to illustrate these concepts – money.

Every country has money – coins and bills. Some currencies are more varied and colourful than others. Australia’s currency is one of those IMHO, but I’m probably biased living Down Under and using Australian currency. Still, the currency concept is pretty well established, so non-Australians should have no trouble following the analogy that I hope illustrates the Multiverse and the Parallel Universe, collectively a conglomerate I term a Megaverse.  

The Australian Multiverse Currency Collective

One Cent Piece: A high density copper Universe that was inhabited by the Feathertail Glider, a civilization unable to prevent the End of their Universe which has collapsed, due to high density, into a singularity and disappeared from sight.

Two Cent Piece: A high density copper Universe that was inhabited by the Frill-Necked Lizard which has also now collapsed for similar reasons into a singularity and disappeared from sight.

Five Cent Piece: A high density silver Universe inhabited by Echidnas, a race of spiny anteaters. It’s currently the smallest high density Universe.

Ten Cent Piece: A high density silver Universe inhabited by Lyrebirds.

Twenty Cent Piece: A high density silver Universe inhabited normally by the dominate race of the Platypus but with a few rarer species as well.

Fifty Cent Piece: A high density silver Universe inhabited mainly by a civilization of a very rare species indeed, the Coat of Arms (i.e. - stylized Kangaroos and Emus) but with a few rarer species as well present – they come and they go. This Universe is unique in having evolved over time from round space-time geometry to twelve-sided space-time geometry (Dodecagon). This Universe is the largest of all the high density Universes.

One Hundred Cent Piece: A high density golden Universe inhabited by a very diverse set of entities, though the dominant life form is a civilization of Kangaroos

Two Hundred Cent Piece: A high density golden Universe inhabited by a humanoid race known as the Aboriginals, an alien species if ever there was one. This Universe is the second smallest of all the known high density Universes.

All of the high density Universes is also by the way inhabited by variations of an alien parasitic species known as the Queen Lizzies.

One Dollar Bill: A low density brownish-orange Universe with a flatland space-time topology, but alas this Universe suffered the cosmological Rig Rip. RIP!

Two Dollar Bill: A low density greenish-yellow Universe with a flatland space-time topology which has now suffered a cosmological final Heat Death. A Two Dollar Bill was never all that crash hot to begin with!

Five Dollar Bill: A low density purple or violet-pinkish Universe with a flatland space-time topology. What’s interesting is that this Universe started out as a pale mauve cosmos before morphing into its current appearance. This Universe also hosts a species of the dreaded alien parasite, the Queen Lizzy. How this species made it from the high density Universes to here is a mystery of currency cosmological physics – perhaps she went through the wormhole.

Ten Dollar Bill: A low density Blue Universe with a flatland space-time topology.

Twenty Dollar Bill: A low density orange Universe with a flatland space-time topology.

Fifty Dollar Bill: A low density Yellow Universe with a flatland space-time topology.

One Hundred Dollar Bill: A low density Green Universe with a flatland space-time topology, the largest in size of all the low density Universes. What’s interesting is that this Universe started out as a light bluish-grey cosmos before morphing into its current appearance.

On some substantial note, all of the low density Universes, all those with a flatland space-time topology, are inhabited by various humanoid entities, so one might conclude that this collection or low density part of the Multiverse is older than the high density Universes. That might make sense if the younger high density Universes are expanding (due to ‘cosmic’ inflation?) and therefore density decreases over the long haul - cosmic evolution in action.

Now none of the above Universes coexist in the exact same space-time. They are all separate and unique Universes, even when in your wallet and jingling in your purse or pocket.

So that’s the collective Australian currency/coinage Multiverse comprised of various Universes, all of different colours and sizes; all with various densities and inhabitants.

But note that you can’t have just any old Universe. There’s no currency physics that allows a Three Dollar Bill Universe or a Seven Cent Coin Universe, though cosmic evolution might allow for that in the far distant future. In the meantime however, there’s allowable currency physics and unallowable currency physics when it comes the allowable and unallowable Universes.

The Australian Parallel Universe Currency Collective

A collection of just Twenty Cent Pieces or just Twenty Dollar Bill Universes would be a collection of Parallel Universes. Each Twenty Cent Piece (or Twenty Dollar Bill) Universe is the same in being a Twenty Cent Piece (or Twenty Dollar Bill) Universe. However, Parallel Universes while the same in terms of each being the same Big Picture, differ in the details – that’s what sets them apart as Parallel or Mirror Universes.

For example, in the case of the Twenty Cent Piece Universe, each Twenty Cent Piece has a case of ‘different strokes for different folks’, the ‘folks’ all being the same Big Picture (i.e. – they are just ‘folks’). Each and every Twenty Cent Piece Universe has a different fate – perhaps a differing date stamped on the coin. Some Universes will be mint and un- circulated; others eroded and/or dented and/or tarnished.

A collection of Twenty Dollar Bill Universes is also a Parallel Universe of Twenty Dollar Bill Universes. Again, each Twenty Dollar Bill Universe has a unique history apart from all other Twenty Dollar Bill Universes. Each has a differing and unique serial number; some maybe counterfeit; some are hot off the printing press, others creased, folded maybe torn. They are all Twenty Dollar Bill Universes, but all are quasi-Mirror images of the generic ideal. All exist in parallel with respect to the others - the same, but different.

Now say you have a stack of One Hundred Dollar Bill Universes. Clearly all are the same Universe, yet no two are absolutely identical – you have a Parallel Universe composed of the One Hundred Dollar Bill Universes. New Parallel One Hundred Dollar Universes are still being created as new bills are manufactured (acts of creation). Some Parallel Universes become defunct too (acts of destruction). Universes are dynamic and evolving entities. 

If you say that you are an inhabitant of the Ten Dollar Bill Universe, you’d probably have no way of contacting or exploring or even knowing about other currency Universes in other space-times. There’s probably no way you could know about and explore another Ten Dollar Bill Universe and meet yourself and discover what alternative history your other self lived; what sort of lifestyle and what sort of worldview did they have. As all Bills and Coins are isolated in their own individual space-time niches, so too are you isolated to that one bit and piece of space-time you find yourself in. The possible exception to this, as demonstrated by the Queen Lizzies, is travelling from one Universe to another via some exotic relativistic currency physics, say via currency wormholes.

In fact, since you cannot escape from your coins or bills currency Universe (currency wormholes apart), you could even think of it has being a currency Black Hole, an object from which nothing can escape! A Black Hole and a Universe might just be one and the same thing. On the other hand, a Black Hole that leaks into a White Hole could have that White Hole exit in another Universe in which case the Black Hole is the wormhole. 

Now, that’s the Megaverse in microcosm; now throw into the mix all the rest of the world’s currencies, past, present and future and you have the Big Picture of the macrocosm Megaverse. Is that all there is? Isn’t that enough?

Megaverse: A few notes.

The Australian one and two cent coins, and the one and two dollar bill denominations are no longer manufactured and are no longer in active circulation, though technically still legal tender.

The Big Rip: The density of the [antigravity] Dark Energy in our Universe gets bigger and bigger as time goes by and the Universe evolves. Trillions of years from now the force of Dark Energy should be so strong as to rip apart even the constituent parts of molecules and atoms down to the level of their fundamental particles.

The Heat Death: We live in an expanding Universe. Unlike our ever increasing supply of Dark Energy, our heat supply is and always has been finite. Thus, over time, that finite supply is spreading out into an ever increasing volume and so the Universe is cooling, ever cooling, down. Eventually, as all the stars exhaust their fuel, the Universe will acquire an overall temperature as close to absolute zero as makes no odds. So you have, as the ultimate fate of the Universe, the slow death of heat, or the Big Chill!

The Singularity: If you gather enough mass together, the ever increasing amount of gravity will eventually become so great that mass will implode, perhaps, according to some physicists, down to a dimensionless point  of infinite density. That’s nonsense IMHO. The imploded object, the singularity, is just very, very, very tiny and very, very, very dense. It’s so dense that the intense gravity traps light and keeps even it from escaping. So you have this singularity, or in other words the heart and soul of a Black Hole.

The Wormhole: A theoretical shortcut, a gateway or passageway linking one part of the Universe to another part (or perhaps one Universe to another). Wormholes are common objects in sci-fi scenarios where you need to quickly get from Point A to Point B which is a massive distance away.

Our Universe in a Cosmic Fish Tank: Part Two

The Big Bang origin-of-our-Universe event was not the be-all-and-end-all of things. The Big Bang event was but a minor event in the larger cosmic scheme of things. If the elementary particles that comprise your mind and body could talk, what a tale of eternity they would tell!

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

OUR BIG BANG ALPHA

Once upon a time there was this Big Bang origin of our Universe. Any Big Bang worthy of its salt results in an expanding Universe. What’s the evidence for the Big Bang, that our Universe is expanding (exploding?) from a point back in time (and therefore by running the film backwards contracting back to that point in time). Well, there are four lines. The first is theoretical. All universes are unstable (as noted above) and must either expand or contract. The second is observational – the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). An explosion – something hot – expands and cools off. The CMBR is the Big Bang’s heat that has now cooled after 13.7 billion years of expansion. The third is also observational – distant objects in space exhibit a red-shift – they look slightly redder than they actually are because they are moving away from us. The farther away, the faster they are moving, the redder they are. If they were moving towards us, they’d appear slightly bluer. The relationship between distance from us and velocity is what you’d expect from something that went ‘bang’.  Lastly, also observational, is the distribution of objects out there. If there were no ‘bang’, then the distribution of objects (galaxies and clusters of galaxies) in space would be more evenly distributed than what’s observed.

Ah, but where are the coordinates – that place in space – we can point our telescopes towards and literally see the remains of that Big Bang explosion? I mean we see the after affects of stellar (supernovae) explosions like the Crab Nebula which occurred in 1054 AD. Well, there’s a vast time difference between 1054 AD and 13.7 billion years ago! By analogy, say you have a fireplace, and on a cold winters night you fire up same, and thus warm up you home to a comfortable level. But after a while, the fire burns out. If you leave the house, but return after a few hours, you will note that your fireplace is still a tad warmer than the rest of the house. That’s like the 1054 AD event. But, now say you go on vacation and don’t return for say a month after-the-fact. When you do, will your fireplace be any warmer than the rest of your home? No! Well, that’s equivalent to the 13.7 billion years. We can’t place those Big Bang coordinates because they have cooled to such an extent as to be the same temperature as the rest of the house, or Universe in this case. The place, those coordinates, of the Big Bang event no longer has any distinguishing features our telescopes can pick up on.   

NOW

Once upon a time, a time we collectively call ‘today’ or ‘now’ or ‘the present’ is all we have to measure what came before and what will come after. What we currently believe is not what was believed a century ago; a thousand years ago; ten thousand years ago. Probably, a century from now; a thousand years from now; ten thousand years from now, what we believe about the Alpha and the Omega of our Universe, and its place, if there is a place, in an even larger context, will probably be as different. Knowledge evolves. The cosmology I learned as a teenager is already vastly different than the cosmology I read about today as a retiree. However, today is all we have to work with, but keep in mind it’s a work in progress. So what do we believe now? One – our Universe had a beginning. Two – our Universe won’t go out with a bang (or a crunch), but with a whimper, just slowly fading away getting thinner and thinner as if our Universe is on some sort of eternal diet. Three – our Universe is the be all and end all of all there is. What can we however speculate on now? One – There was a ‘before’ before our Universe began. Two – our Universe may have a different fate in store, and it could end in a bang (or crunch), not a whimper. Three – there may be far more to the cosmos than has yet been dreamt of in anyone philosophy. In fact, if one looks at the history of the size of our cosmic neck of the woods, the trend has always been towards a vaster and vaster cosmos. If our ancestors could only know then, what we know now, their minds would have been so boggled as to probably defy description. So, if we could know now, what our future generations will know, no doubt our heads would hurt too!

Part of our ‘now’ is the presence of something called ‘dark matter’, of immense importance to things cosmological, that cosmologists can’t yet explain or identify. Okay, I’ll make an heroic speculative effort to explain it in the light of what I’ve postulated above.

Now, it has been speculated that matter that gets sucked into a Black Hole undergoes a phase change into a new form of matter, sort of like ice to water to steam, or steam to water to ice. What exactly the nature of that inside-the-Black-Hole phase change is – well, your guess is as good as mine. However, I have come up with an idea. The matter sucked inside a Black Hole has been transformed into ‘dark matter’! Now ‘dark matter’ has mass and gravity, but doesn’t interact with any electromagnetic forces. We know that because ‘dark matter’ exists within our Universe; not of necessity hidden exclusively within Black Holes. So, how does ‘dark matter’ get out of a Black Hole and into our Universe at large? It doesn’t, at least not as ‘dark matter’ but maybe a Hawking radiation. Well, that doesn’t explain the ‘dark matter’ all around us. So there has to be an exception, and I suggest that exception was the transformation of a previous universe’s Big Crunch – forming the Mother of all Black Holes – so warping space-time that it turned itself inside out and emerged as a While Hole, spilling out its contents and forming our Universe in the process. The Mother of all Black Holes transformed much of that universe’s ordinary matter into ‘dark matter’, but the process of Black to While Hole transformation happened so rapidly that not all matter got so converted before the spewing. So, what was vomited as our Universe was a lot of ‘dark energy’, but not quite 100%, keeping in line with what we observe, or rather detect but don’t directly observe, today. 

THE FATE OF OUR UNIVERSE OMEGA: HEAT DEATH & THE BIG RIP

Once upon a way, way, way future time, our Universe will be drastically different than the one we know today. There are three possibilities. Firstly, the total amount of gravity (a pull force) will be enough to cause our Universe to slow down, stop, and reverse direction, to ultimately result in a Big Crunch. That’s unlikely based on current observational evidence. Secondly, the Universe’s gravity could be just enough to slow the expansion rate of the Universe down, such that it reaches zero velocity after an infinite amount of time. That sort of knife-edge balance is unlikely. Way too many factors have to balance each other out. It’s like tossing a ball at a ceiling hundreds of metres high, and having the ball just stop its upward trajectory just as it ever so barely caresses the ceiling. That’s way too unlikely a scenario. Thirdly, the Universe’s gravity won’t be enough to stop, far less reverse the expansion, and thus our Universe will forever, and forever, and forever (amen) grow ever bigger, ever decrease in mass/energy density, until overall, there’s so little energy available per volume of space that even one minute of warmth will be worth thousands of times what the price of gold is today. In fact, it will be priceless. That’s what is known as the Heat Death fate of our Universe.

Current observational evidence suggests the third option as the likely option. Contrary to expectations, our Universe’s expansion rate is not slowing down (under gravity’s pull force), but is instead accelerating under a currently postulated but mysterious ‘Dark Energy’ (push) force. Now this ‘Dark Energy’ push force is a function of space itself. The more space, the more ‘Dark Energy’ there is. Space is of course expanding, so ‘Dark Energy’ is becoming ever more dominant. Eventually, ‘Dark Energy’ could be powerful enough to push clusters of galaxies apart; push the components of individual galaxies apart; then the stars that comprise those galaxies and the solar systems that surround those stellar systems. ‘Dark Energy’, as it grows more powerful, could then push apart stars and planets; hence the molecules than make up those bodies into atoms. In turn, those atoms could be pushed apart into their fundamental particles – quarks and electrons and photons, etc. Whether or not quarks and electrons and photons can be further torn apart – well, that’s pushing the boundaries of current particle physics. Anyway, all this pushing apart is collectively termed ‘The Big Rip’.

The interesting bit is that if there is an outside of our Universe, then in theory, humans – assuming there are humans around trillions of years hence – or other intelligent life forms will be able to escape the Heat Death and/or Big Rip.

One obvious question rears its ugly head. If our Universe originated from another Big Crunch universe, and if our Universe is not fated to end in a Big Crunch, that breaks any sort of expected oscillation or cycle. Our Universe in turn can’t generate another universe further on down the track. Yet it should since we presumably inherited that previous universe’s full compliment of matter and energy and thus should be fated to ultimately Big Crunch as well. Presumably, something happened during the Big Crunch – Big Bang transition to perhaps siphon off some of the matter/energy and send it to an else-where or else-when. The extreme physics that would operate during such a transition aren’t well understood and I have to leave open the possible that something more relevant to “The Twilight Zone” can happen. Of course perhaps something further on down the track might revise the current expectations for the fate of our Universe – the pendulum could swing back towards a Big Crunch scenario.

 So, how do we get Big Crunches?

There are two possible ways. One is a universe that’s massive enough to collapse, generate a new universe, which then collapses and the cycle repeats. No “Twilight Zone” weird physics happens within the transition, or at least not enough to alter the outcome. The other is to have one ever expanding universe intersect another ever expanding universe. The area of intersection would increase (double) the mass/energy content within that area. That then might be enough to cause that area to start contracting and ultimately Big Crunch. This is similar to, say one supernova spewing out dust and gas; another supernova – ditto. The intersection of part of the two expanding regions of gas/dust is then enough to cause a local contraction of the combined gas/dust, ultimately forming a new, next generation, star, probably an entire stellar system (star + planets). 

DOES THE COSMOS CARE?

In our Universe, stars are born; stars die. Their matter and energy get recycled into new stars. In our cosmic fish tank, universes are born; universes die and their matter and energy get recycled into new universes. It doesn’t really matter whether a universe dies in a Big Crunch or in a Big Rip/Heat Death. The elementary bits and pieces, electrons and quarks and photons are eternal or immortal. They, unlike us, don’t age. And so, in the broadest of broadest of points of view, our Universe comes to some sort of end, but ‘life’ goes on. The fish tank cosmos doesn’t concern itself with the end of our Universe, any more than our galaxy gives a stuff about the end of our solar system, no does our Sun concern itself with the petty affairs on one of its planets – Earth.

Humans may care – all else is indifferent.

AN ULTIMATE TRUTH

Whether or not there was some sort of ultimate beginning; whether or not there will be some sort of ultimate ending, the bits and pieces that currently make up you, were there and will be there. That, in one sense, makes you as immortal as the cosmos itself.