Recent content by AstroNovice

Some physicists (Smolin, Rees, Susskind) have posited a "multiverse" (or "megaverse", Susskind's preferred term) in which infinite universes co-exist, in which case there is something "outside" of our universe. Obviously this is something that cannot be verified through observation, but...

I was just rereading part of The God Delusion and discovered this is where I originally came across this hypothesis. Dawkins draws the argument from Leonard Susskind, who put it forth in his book The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design. I gather Susskind...

CMB = Cosmic Microwave Background. You can ignore that part of my question.

What if we were able to detect that this "duplicate" was expanding in opposition to our known universe?

I guess what would make these "bubbles" separate "universes" is that they would be expanding in opposition to one another. But I agree that the "super-universe" would simply be the universe. If this idea turned out to be true (ha ha), we might assign a new name to the bubble we'd previously...

Okay, then what if what we currently think of as "the universe" is one of multiple, or infinite, such entities, each expanding independently? Then this spatially bounded "universe" would exist within a larger, perhaps unbounded, universe. And a collision between two or more of these units would...

I find this satisfyingly awe-inspiring; it also gives me some sense of what it might mean for the universe to be spatially bounded.

Thanks so much, both of you, for taking the time to respond to my questions. I find it impossible to conceive of how the Big Bang could have been the beginning of time. In order for it to have occurred, there must have been some process building up to it, and processes can only occur in...

Please bear with me. I'm by no means well versed in these matters. I'm merely an interested layman. This question might not even make sense, but, if it doesn't, maybe someone could help me understand why. What I'm wondering is this. If we posit multiple universes -- not in the quantum sense...