Current Research on Communication Between Universes?

[Mandy mae]

I will spare all the background, and simply as my question.

Does anyone know of any current research being done on communication between universes in relation to multiverse theory?

Laugh at you will at the concept.

I am currently collecting data and baselines for evaluating occurrences, and was hoping to touch base with others who are studying this as well.

 

[e.bar.goum]

This depends on whether you mean communication in the sense that physicists might use it - "does there exist any observational evidence for multiple universes (in the sense of eternal inflation) interacting with our own?", and you do see stuff about looking for signatures in the CMB reasonably often. (but most people criticize at those attempts - if you look closely at Gaussian noise, you can see anything) IIRC it was Penrose who was doing that first. Some different work on the same kind of thing can be found in papers here http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1995 and http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.3667

You also occassionaly see papers like this: http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0311014 I'm not qualified to speak to the substance of that paper though (and I've only read the abstract).

On the other hand if you mean communication in the lay-person sense "can you hear voices from an alternate earth?", then no. Really, not. And PF isn't the place to talk about crank things like that.

 

[bapowell]

Things that we can communicate with are by definition within our observable universe. So, if we could communicate with another universe, in what sense would it be another universe and not just part of ours?

 

[Chronos]

Multiverse theories generally require other universes to be causally disconnected. Were they not, they would necessarily be an extension, as bapowell noted.

 

[enorbet]

While it rather blurs the line between multi and causally connected, if Roger Penrose is correct there may be artifacts in the CMB from some previous Universe... or he could just be "channeling" Percival Lowell. :P

 

[Chronos]

That is ludicrous. Not the first time Penrose has dove off the deep end. The guy is brilliant, but, eccentric.

 

[e.bar.goum]

That is ludicrous. Not the first time Penrose has dove off the deep end. The guy is brilliant, but, eccentric.

It's not just Penrose. There has been some later work that was perhaps a bit more thought through, on looking for evidence of eternal inflation in the CMB - see the first two links I provided upthread, or this blog post summarizing the work from Sean Carroll's blog. The tl'dr is that they didn't find any evidence:

"Cutting to the chase, we were first able to use simulated CMB data containing bubble collisions to rule out a range of parameter space as inconsistent with WMAP data. As it turned out, the existence of a temperature discontinuity at the boundary of the disc greatly increases our ability to make a detection. We did not find any circular temperature discontinuities in the WMAP data."
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[enorbet]

That is ludicrous. Not the first time Penrose has dove off the deep end. The guy is brilliant, but, eccentric.

Aye. Thus the comparison to "canals on Mars".

 

[zoki85]

Does anyone know of any current research being done on communication between universes in relation to multiverse theory?

Laugh at you will at the concept.

I vaguely recall reading Stephen King has done some research in that direction. Or maybe it was Stephen Hawking. Not sure...Stephen something