Marvel Comics was apparently (way) ahead of its time.
Posted on 05/19/2013 10:59:00 PM PDT by LibWhacker
Scientists believe they have found the first evidence of the existence of other universes beyond our own, following analysis of the radiation left behind by the Big Bang.
Data gathered by the European Space Agency's Planck spacecraft enabled researchers to map the "cosmic microwave" of background radiation left behind when the universe began 13.8 billion years ago.
The findings imply the universe could be just one of billions, or even an infinite number, they say.
The map showed anomalies that cosmologists believe could only have been caused by the gravitational pull of other universes outside our own.
"These anomalies were caused by other universes pulling on our universe as it formed during the Big Bang," said Laura Mersini-Houghton, of the University of North Carolina.
"They are the first hard evidence for the existence of other universes that we have seen."
With her colleague Professor Richard Holman of Carnegie Mellon University, Mersini-Houghton published a series of papers from 2005 predicting that pictures from Planck would show our universe to be subject to a "pull" from other universes.
"It may be that the statistical anomalies described in this paper are a hint of more profound physical phenomena that are yet to be revealed," they wrote in a recent paper.
Planck gathered radiation from the universe when it was just 370,000 years old - and still glowing from the Big Bang.
Faint traces of radiation that has travelled across space for 13.8bn years is still detectable, but shows up far stronger in one half of the sky than the other. A large "cold" spot shows where the temperature is below average.
Mersini-Houghton will set out her findings at the How The Light Gets In festival in Hay-on-Wye in Herefordshire this week, and at a cosmology conference in Oxford.
George Efstathiou, professor of astrophysics at Cambridge and co-author of the research, said the findings "may sound wacky now, just like the Big Bang theory did three generations ago. But then we got evidence and now it has changed the whole way we think about the universe".
Malcolm Perry, professor of theoretical physics at Cambridge, said the idea was "very exciting", but would require further research.
"It is exactly right to say that this could be the first evidence for other universes," he said.
multiverse?
maybe different time lines cause different universes?
This doesn’t even make sense.
The universe is the universe.
I prefer pondering multiple realities.
So, there might just be a Tooth Fairy!
This is pure speculation.
Great. Thanks. Now I’m going to stay awake in bed tonight looking at the ceiling getting all existential.
E=MC2 was just speculation until proven to be correct.
And the multiverse is the multiverse.
/johnny
Can I have a grant? Can I, can I? Please, please, please, please. Gimme a grant! Whaaaaaaaaaaaaa
It’s M-Theory.
we are all little tadpoles in the greater pondering
or something
Goes nicely with the data that seems to indicate that our current universe had predecessors.
As far as I can tell, that was what everyone thought before Georges Lamaitre's theory was widely accepted. It was the Naturalists that were slow to adopt Lamaitre's theory (later called the Big Bang theory), and he was hard pressed to convince people that he wasn't unduly influenced by his belief in God (he was a Jesuit Priest as well as an astrophysicist), since it appears to be a theory of when the universe was created...which would mean that it had not always existed, and thus there must be something beyond it. It seems that shortly after the wide acceptance in the scientific community that the natural universe had a particular point in time that it started, that some people started using the word "cosmos" in a way meant to imply that the only thing beyond the natural universe is just a bigger system of natural universes. Presumably each of these universes had the chance to evolve life. And a tiny chance to evolve pink unicorns...which would be invisible to us, as they are in another "universe"...
Matrix theory?
Sorry, but that is about the universe(science deffinition, meaning planets and what not)expanding, not the forming of space. Has space always been there and if not, what was there before? Questions no one can actually answer, and until we invent some way of crossing light years of space in seconds we will never know if the present theories of the Universe are true or not.
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