Could Parallel Universes Be Physically Real?

nivek

As Above So Below
Could Parallel Universes Be Physically Real?

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We can imagine a very large number of possible outcomes that could have resulted from the conditions our Universe was born with. The fact that all 10^90 particles contained within our Universe unfolded with the interactions they experienced and the outcomes that they arrived at over the past 13.8 billion years led to all the intricacies of our experiences, including our very existence. It is possible, if there were enough chances, that this could occur many times, leading to a scenario that we think of as "infinite parallel Universes" that contain all possible outcomes, including the roads our Universe didn't travel.
Jaime Salcido/simulations by the EAGLE Collaboration

You've likely imagined it before: another Universe out there, just like this one, where all the random events and chances that brought about our reality exactly as it is played out just the same. Except right now, when you made one fateful decision in this Universe, you took an alternate path in this other Universe. These two Universes, which ran parallel to one another for so long, suddenly diverge.

Perhaps our Universe, with the version of events we're familiar with, isn't the only one out there. Perhaps there are other Universes, perhaps even with different versions of ourselves, different histories and alternate outcomes from what we've experienced. This isn't just fiction, but one of the most exciting possibilities brought up by theoretical physics. Here's what the science says about whether parallel Universes might actually be real.

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On a logarithmic scale, the Universe nearby has the solar system and our Milky Way galaxy. But far beyond are all the other galaxies in the Universe, the large-scale cosmic web, and eventually the moments immediately following the Big Bang itself. Although we cannot observe farther than this cosmic horizon which is presently a distance of 46.1 billion light-years away, there will be more Universe to reveal itself to us in the future. The observable Universe contains 2 trillion galaxies today, but as time goes on, more Universe will become observable to us, perhaps revealing some cosmic truths that are obscure to us today. - Wikipedia user Pablo Carlos Budassi

As vast as our Universe might be, the part that we can see, access, affect, or be affected by is finite and quantifiable. Including photons and neutrinos, it contains some 1090 particles, clumped and clustered together into approximately two trillion galaxies, with perhaps another two-to-three trillion galaxies that will reveal themselves to us as the Universe continues to expand.

Each such galaxy comes with around a trillion stars inside it (on average), and these galaxies clump together in an enormous, cosmos-spanning web that extends for 46 billion light-years away from us in all directions. But, despite what our intuition might tell us, that doesn’t mean we’re at the center of a finite Universe. In fact, the full suite of evidence indicates something quite to the contrary.

The reason the Universe appears finite in size to us — the reason we can’t see anything that’s more than a specific distance away — isn’t because the Universe is actually finite in size, but is rather because the Universe has only existed in its present state for a finite amount of time.

If you learn nothing else about the Big Bang, it should be this: the Universe was not constant in space or in time, but rather has evolved from a more uniform, hotter, denser state to a clumpier, cooler and more diffuse state today. As we go to earlier and earlier times, the Universe appears smoother and with fewer, less-evolved galaxies; as we look to later times, the galaxies are larger and more massive, consisting of older stars, with greater distances separating galaxies, groups, and clusters from one another.

This has given us a rich Universe, containing many relics from our shared cosmic history, including:
  • many generations of stars,
  • an ultra-cold background of leftover radiation,
  • galaxies that appear to recede away from us ever-more-rapidly the more distant they are,
  • with a fundamental limit to how far back we can see.
The limit to our cosmic perspective is set by the distance that light has had the ability to travel since the moment of the Big Bang.

But this in no way means that there isn’t more Universe out there beyond the portion that’s accessible to us. In fact, there's both observational and theoretical arguments that point to the existence of much more Universe beyond what we see: perhaps even infinitely more.

(much more on the link)

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spacecase0

earth human
I know that other people have other conditions for what they think is proof.
but I was convinced about alternate realities being a physical thing when I saw the double slit experiment done as a single photon.
that test shows to me that the photon is being physically pushed around by itself in alternate timelines.
and to physically push something around, I am pretty sure it has to be somewhere physically
 
I usually enjoy Ethan Siegel's articles, but this one is very disappointing. He's suggesting, devoid of empirical evidence, that the universe may have other patches located far beyond our visible cosmic horizon, where inflation also ended, but which are separated from us by regions where inflation never ended. That's a lot of speculation.

Ultimately he concludes that "parallel universes" (meaning other patches of this one universe where there's another version of you or me or both) are very unlikely.

I think it's very misleading and sensationalistic to call these totally hypothetical different patches of the universe, "other universes." In his hypothetical model, these are just different regions of this one universe, which are very very far away from us.

I know that other people have other conditions for what they think is proof.
but I was convinced about alternate realities being a physical thing when I saw the double slit experiment done as a single photon.
that test shows to me that the photon is being physically pushed around by itself in alternate timelines.
and to physically push something around, I am pretty sure it has to be somewhere physically
Your logic is faulty: photons don't get "pushed around" by each other in this universe, so why would they get pushed around by photons in some hypothetical alternate reality? Even in Everett's many-worlds interpretation, the different versions of reality don't interact with each other - in his model each possible path of the photon is simply taken in a different universe. But of course it's absurd to believe that there's an entire infinity of universes for every possible path of every photon, and every other possible quantum interaction happening everywhere in the universe all of the time.

Schrodinger's equation describes the wavefunction of photons perfectly well without resorting to alternate reality explanations.
 
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spacecase0

earth human
at this point it is clear to me that many of my ideas are absurd to you.
I am convinced that time flows not beginning to end, but from the least likely timeline to the most likely timeline.
and that the other timelines are where the other realities are. Consciousness being what connects them.
but this all leads back to what you think reality is made of.
 

Shadowprophet

Truthiness
Time in this Universe is "perceived from beginning to end" There are theories in quantum mechanics that state that time being relative could flow differently or erratically or even backward, This Quantum Theory Says Time Can Flow Backward

However, When thinking about Time, you have to consider that time is also the 4th dimension, And our ability to perceive time is limited in a number of ways, While we experience and recognize time, Our ability to perceive it, may be limited in ways we could never comprehend because it's quantumly interacting with a dimension of space we have very limited understanding of. Time perception - Wikipedia Time could even be a construct we created, manufactured because we don't understand some fundamental force of nature. The Illusion of Time: What's Real?

In short, Time Exists as a whole, And we experience it linearly because we are limited creatures. Either way, I can Vouch for Thomas's understanding of Time. The man knows his physics. Time in this universe at least from our perceptions of it, Does progress forward.

There is even a theory, That because our perception of time is so limited, That between each passing moment, nanosecond to nanosecond, Billions if not trillions of years could factually be passing, Simply because our time is relatively shared, We don't experience this. The theory was called, Infinite divisibility I believe. Infinite divisibility (probability) - Wikipedia
 
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at this point it is clear to me that many of my ideas are absurd to you.
It's not personal. I'm simply pointing out a fact: photons in this universe don't interact with each other. Ergo I don't see any basis for your reasoning about photon interactions across alternate realities.

I am convinced that time flows not beginning to end, but from the least likely timeline to the most likely timeline.
and that the other timelines are where the other realities are. Consciousness being what connects them.
I'm an empiricist. Therefore since I see no evidence of other timelines, I will assume that they don't exist until I see a compelling empirical (or even theoretical) reason to reconsider the subject.

My theoretical work did arrive at a startling finding though: it appears that our timeline is completely predetermined, and only our limited perception of time gives us the illusion of free will and indeterminism. So it's possible that the universe we observe must be exactly as it is, and evolve as it's evolving, otherwise it couldn't have existed in the first place.

but this all leads back to what you think reality is made of.
That's an interesting question. On one hand we have all of the particles of the Standard Model - so we know the building blocks of matter and energy. On the other hand, we have the spacetime stage upon which matter and energy interact - and I'm intrigued with the concept recently described by Verlinde (and others before him) that model spacetime as an emergent phenomenon produced by underlying gradients of entropy.

There's never been a credible scientific detection of an influence of consciousness upon physical reality, so it's unclear how (and even "if") consciousness should be a part of our physics models. For the time being anyway, it seems suitable to place consciousness in the domain of metaphysics - we can experiment with it at the subjective level and produce very significant experiences, but it doesn't seem to influence matter or energy...so until that changes, it doesn't seem relevant to the subject of physics. Frankly I think that more work should be done to study the influence of one consciousness upon another, as Rupert Sheldrake has done, rather than continuing to try and fail to unify consciousness with physics.

Time in this Universe is "perceived from beginning to end" There are theories in quantum mechanics that state that time being relative could flow differently or erratically or even backward, This Quantum Theory Says Time Can Flow Backward
Quantum retrocausality is sort of inappropriately named: the idea isn't that "the future changes the past" as much as "the present boundary conditions and the future boundary conditions together determine the specific properties of the probabilistic events that we observe" - in this model the indeterminism and even the uncertainty principle are a kind of illusion produced by the limits of our observable reference frame.

There is a really bizarre and fascinating model that predicts that at a specific state of the universe, time will stop and then begin to flow in reverse. We did a podcast episode about it here:

Physics Frontiers: A Gravitational Arrow of Time

However, When thinking about Time, you have to consider that time is also the 4th dimension, And our ability to perceive time is limited in a number of ways, While we experience and recognize time, Our ability to perceive it, may be limited in ways we could never comprehend because it's quantumly interacting with a dimension of space we have very limited understanding of. Time perception - Wikipedia Time could even be a construct we created, manufactured because we don't understand some fundamental force of nature. The Illusion of Time: What's Real?
I tend to see it the way that you and Huw Price see it: we live in a block universe where the past present and future all coexist, but our limited experience of consciousness confines our awareness to a single vector, "forward" in time.

There is even a theory, That because our perception of time is so limited, That between each passing moment, nanosecond to nanosecond, Billions if not trillions of years could factually be passing, Simply because our time is relatively shared, We don't experience this. The theory was called, Infinite divisibility I believe. Infinite divisibility (probability) - Wikipedia
It' s interesting that relativity gives us a similar scenario: from our reference frame time appears to be moving far more quickly than we observe with very distant reference frames near the cosmic horizon (and even locally accelerated reference frames moving close to the speed of light with respect to our reference frame). And this is true with regions of high gravitation as well - an observer near a black hole can see billions of years of cosmic evolution fly by in a moment.
 
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spacecase0

earth human
There's never been a credible scientific detection of an influence of consciousness upon physical reality, so it's unclear how (and even "if") consciousness should be a part of our physics models. For the time being anyway, it seems suitable to place consciousness in the domain of metaphysics - we can experiment with it at the subjective level and produce very significant experiences, but it doesn't seem to influence matter or energy...so until that changes, it doesn't seem relevant to the subject of physics. Frankly I think that more work should be done to study the influence of one consciousness upon another, as Rupert Sheldrake has done, rather than continuing to try and fail to unify consciousness with physics.
ever focus on a SQUID detector ?
the idea that this can't be reproduced is funny
go try it.
guess that this does cross into the metaphysics realm, and that is why most don't talk about it.
the idea and history of credibility is fascinating
I am pretty sure that you can prove or disprove anything if you take that into account
selectively tossing out test results does not prove anything
denying the results of consciousness research on grounds of credibility does not help you figure out reality.
yet again, I say go try it.
lots of research has already been done on the topic,
yet somehow anything touching the metaphysics realm is not credible by default
see how this works ?
 

nivek

As Above So Below
I am pretty sure that all of reality is a construct, not just time.

Indeed and with time existing in other vibrational levels of existence, not just this physical existence...As above so below, as our consciousness expands awareness and functionality in higher existential vibrations, it's freed from the previous laws it once existed under...There is a ceiling for time but no ceiling for consciousness...

...
 
ever focus on a SQUID detector ?
the idea that this can't be reproduced is funny
SQUID detectors, fMRIs and EEGs all detect brain activity (and the activity of any other bodily organ for that matter), so you're invoking an entirely biological example. A SQUID will also detect a dynamic signal if I place it on my foot, or my refrigerator.

What you're saying is essentially the same as saying: "your consciousness can change your rate of breathing, and your rate of breathing can be easily measured, ergo the effect of consciousness can be easily measured." The problem with this line of reasoning is that it fails to demonstrate that consciousness is anything more than an illusory phenomenon produced by the purely mechanistic biochemistry of the brain; any activity in the brain will produce a detectable signal just as any activity of the stomach will produce a detectable signal just as any activity of a computer processor will produce a detectable signal. And I can make my stomach change its signal pattern by injecting it with any number of chemicals - perhaps the brain operates in precisely the same way: purely chemically. So any such readings can be explained in purely physical terms: consciousness is not required to explain such signals because they're produced entirely by matter.

I've looked into a lot of claims that assert that consciousness itself can have influences upon various types of experiments, such as the double-slit experiment, and in every case the claims were false. I'd love to see evidence that consciousness can directly interact with the world around us, but its influence seems to be limited to the brain, and that opens the unanswerable question "is the consciousness influencing the brain, or is the brain's mechanistic activity simply producing the subjective illusion of consciousness?" I'm not convinced that Descartes was right: thought may simply be a natural product of the brain in the same way that a human pulse is the product of a pumping heart - the idea of "self" may simply be an evolutionary trick that nature used to make us avoid getting killed; if the brain tells you that you're an individual and not just a sophisticated biological machine, then suddenly you have a sense of self-preservation and a fear of death. Unless somebody can prove that consciousness is something objectively real in its own right, independent of the brain, then it's quite possible that we're all just meaningless bags of meat operating under the delusion of personal identity.

Maybe the great realization of people like Buddha and Christ is that we're just machinery of the cosmos like the Earth orbiting the Sun, and our ideas about individuality and consciousness are nothing more than an illusion: there is no death of the self because the self never existed in the first place.
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
Maybe the great realization of people like Buddha and Christ is that we're just machinery of the cosmos like the Earth orbiting the Sun, and our ideas about individuality and consciousness are nothing more than an illusion: there is no death of the self because the self never existed in the first place

Probably some aspect of human evolution at work there so that we can exist in cooperative groups and survive as a species.

EDIT - The belief in some greater plane of existence, that is.
 
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Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
ever focus on a SQUID detector ?
the idea that this can't be reproduced is funny
go try it.
guess that this does cross into the metaphysics realm, and that is why most don't talk about it.
the idea and history of credibility is fascinating
I am pretty sure that you can prove or disprove anything if you take that into account
selectively tossing out test results does not prove anything
denying the results of consciousness research on grounds of credibility does not help you figure out reality.
yet again, I say go try it.
lots of research has already been done on the topic,
yet somehow anything touching the metaphysics realm is not credible by default
see how this works ?

Yeah, if that is so, how did poor old universe function before we came to be?

Universe exists for 13.5 billion years, animals exist for 500 million years, humans about 150,000 years. So consciousness at a best had influenced universe only for the last 150,000 years.

If consciousness is not pure malarkey, lets consider this, AI passed the Turring's test: meaning it can not be distinguished from human. Does that mean that AI is conscious, as we supposedly are? In other words, existence of AI, and the fact that it isn't conscious, proves once for all that consciousness doesn't exist.
 
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AI passed the Turring's test: meaning it can not be distinguished from human. Does that mean that AI is conscious, as we supposedly are? In other words, existence of AI, and the fact that it isn't conscious, proves once for all that consciousness doesn't exist.
That's an interesting argument, but "proof" is a big word - I'm not sure that we can say that something doesn't exist simply because it can be simulated so well that we can't tell one from the other.

It's also possible that consciousness is a fundamental property of the entire cosmos, and that the brain acts like some kind of receiver for it - in that case we could mistake our experience of consciousness for a personal individual phenomenon when in reality it may be the same field of consciousness that we all experience but filtered through the particular idiosyncratic "filter" of our individual brain matter.

Clearly I haven't reached a conclusion about this subject. But I do find it to be compelling that we still can't rule out the possibility that we're all just some kind of "meat robots" dreaming that we're self-determining beings.
 

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
That's an interesting argument, but "proof" is a big word - I'm not sure that we can say that something doesn't exist simply because it can be simulated so well that we can't tell one from the other.

It's also possible that consciousness is a fundamental property of the entire cosmos, and that the brain acts like some kind of receiver for it - in that case we could mistake our experience of consciousness for a personal individual phenomenon when in reality it may be the same field of consciousness that we all experience but filtered through the particular idiosyncratic "filter" of our individual brain matter.

Clearly I haven't reached a conclusion about this subject. But I do find it to be compelling that we still can't rule out the possibility that we're all just some kind of "meat robots" dreaming that we're self-determining beings.

Let me reassure you on this. There is a Stanford neurobiologist, professor Robert Sapolsky, writing books and giving lectures all over the US (lots on YouTube). He's expert on connection of human behavior and human brain. He says this: physiologically and biologically, there is zero difference between our and chimpanzee brain. ZERO! The only difference is that our brain is twice larger. If chimps are MS-DOS, we are Windows 3.11. Monkeys with car keys. That is all.

Real question is, how would we reason if our brain was not the one inherited from chimps? Or how would we reason if our brain was 3 times bigger than chimps, or why not, 6 times bigger?

As for the universe, it is just pile of rocks, some hot, some cold. Spacetime doesn't contain any feelings and much less thoughts. Otherwise Donald Trump would never be elected as POTUS ;). But granted awareness-universe interconnection sounds more poetical, not to mention more sexy.

It is all like in one episode of "Twilight Zone". There was a handful of dolls sitting on a bottom of dustbin on a Sunset Boulevard. They were pondering the meaning of life, but just got nowhere, mostly because the walls of the dustbin were too tall for them to scale up. And, all around them, there was possibly one of the most exciting places in a whole world, Sunset Boulevard.
 
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spacecase0

earth human
Yeah, if that is so, how did poor old universe function before we came to be?

Universe exists for 13.5 billion years, animals exist for 500 million years, humans about 150,000 years. So consciousness at a best had influenced universe only for the last 150,000 years.

If consciousness is not pure malarkey, lets consider this, AI passed the Turring's test: meaning it can not be distinguished from human. Does that mean that AI is conscious, as we supposedly are? In other words, existence of AI, and the fact that it isn't conscious, proves once for all that consciousness doesn't exist.
I never even suggested that it was human consciousness that created our reality
not suggesting it was a "god" or even the consciousness running individual atoms,
was likely something that got board and invented reality as a logic exercise, and it ended up being so good that most everyone moved in at some point
 

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
I never even suggested that it was human consciousness that created our reality
not suggesting it was a "god" or even the consciousness running individual atoms,
was likely something that got board and invented reality as a logic exercise, and it ended up being so good that most everyone moved in at some point

Well, than that consciousness is mathematics itself. Universe might be chaotic on surface, but deep under everything runs on math.

Maths is even more fundamental that physics. Maths can define anything. Some forms of consciousness, like AI, were developed from pure math and can compete with human consciousness reasonably well.

One can say that the main difference between us and chimps is that we can do the math.
 
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Georgek

George
Well, than that consciousness is mathematics itself. Universe might be chaotic on surface, but deep under everything runs on math.

Maths is even more fundamental that physics. Maths can define anything. Some forms of consciousness, like AI, were developed from pure math and can compete with human consciousness reasonably well.

One can say that the main difference between us and chimps is that we can do the math.

I also found this true when I did advanced maths at university.

When I became an engineer, folks told me that NOW I was down to reality and that I will see the materialistic physical attributes of engineering.

It taught me the opposite and allowed me to exploit relative time theory and the given Sine wave in relation to Einsteins relativity by using circular motion instead of linear .

I got a distinction for my maths because my lecturer said that my mathematics was beyond his understanding and although he could not validate the maths, he could not fail it either.
 

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
I also found this true when I did advanced maths at university.

When I became an engineer, folks told me that NOW I was down to reality and that I will see the materialistic physical attributes of engineering.

It taught me the opposite and allowed me to exploit relative time theory and the given Sine wave in relation to Einsteins relativity by using circular motion instead of linear .

I got a distinction for my maths because my lecturer said that my mathematics was beyond his understanding and although he could not validate the maths, he could not fail it either.

Yeah, now there are 2 of us in the whole world :)

Engineers are just a joke, don't listen to them. I'm an engineer and I can see how much I don't know when I compare my knowledge to knowledge of physicists and mathematicians. An engineer doesn't know 10% of what physicist does. I love engineering, but it's not just that engineers don't know how much they don't know, 99% of them have no imagination either. Most of new products are actually conceived by marketing people.

My maths is just about good enough to help me buy groceries. But I've seen first hand what AI maths can do and I had that Eureka moment. Not to mention General Relativity and Quantum Mechanic.
 

Georgek

George
The only thing that I disagree here is that engineers do have imagination because they can create. Or so it seems. Many are designers but then again that could be down to copying? I think you make that clear by marketing?

There is also a difference between maths and arithmetic. The maths what we learnt was analytical maths or Pure Maths.

When I did my course at university, I was told to shut my mouth about parapsychology.

Reason being was that engineers needed to be able to take things to bits and then put them back together again.

Don't underestimate them at the top.........many are just as good as physicists and and can 'crunch' formula just like that!

Nearly all engineers do not know what a Sine wave looks like. They think it is an 'S' on it's side.

Mechanical maths can be very mind boggling.

slide_8.jpg


I had to memorise all this...lol All forgotten now...thank God.

You see...they can memorise all this...but do not understand it.
 

Georgek

George
The only thing that I disagree here is that engineers do have imagination because they can create. Or so it seems. Many are designers but then again that could be down to copying? I think you make that clear by marketing?

There is also a difference between maths and arithmetic. The maths what we learnt was analytical maths or Pure Maths.

When I did my course at university, I was told to shut my mouth about parapsychology.

Reason being was that engineers needed to be able to take things to bits and then put them back together again.

Don't underestimate them at the top.........many are just as good as physicists and and can 'crunch' formula just like that!

Nearly all engineers do not know what a Sine wave looks like. They think it is an 'S' on it's side.

Mechanical maths can be very mind boggling.

slide_8.jpg


I had to memorise all this...lol All forgotten now...thank God.

You see...they can memorise all this...but do not understand it.
 
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