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There Is No "You" In a Parallel Universe
StartsWithABang (3485481) writes "Ever since quantum mechanics first came along, we've recognized how tenuous our perception of reality is, and how — in many ways — what we perceive is just a very small subset of what's going on at the quantum level in our Universe. Then, along came cosmic inflation, teaching us that our observable Universe is just a tiny, tiny fraction of the matter-and-radiation filled space out there, with possibilities including Universes with different fundamental laws and constants, differing quantum outcomes existing in disconnected regions of space, and even the fantastic one of parallel Universes and alternate versions of you and me. But is that last one really admissible? The best modern evidence teaches us that even with all the Universes that inflation creates, it's still a finite number, and an insufficiently large number to contain all the possibilities that a 13.8 billion year old Universe with 10^90 particles admits."
Fox "News".
Table-ized A.I.
Well, it kind of does, depending on exactly how you define the term. One of the implications of inflation theory is that the original superluminal inflation is still going on, and will always be going on, and what we consider to be "the universe" is but one tiny bubble of "stabilized" space that decayed from the inflationary energy, and is presumably surrounded by a nigh-infinite number of other bubbles with different physical laws that will never interact with each other because the space between them is still full of self-replicating inflationary energy expanding faster than light, and which is perpetually spawning still more bubbles as the false-vacuum spontaneously decays into lower-energy states to trigger a chain reaction. You could easily consider every one of those other "bubbleverses" to be a parallel universe, with it's own physical laws and causality that will never intersect our own.
Of course that has absolutely nothing to do with the sort of parallel universes posited by the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which absolutely would spawn a potential infinitude of "other yous" with every quantum "decision". And neither has anything to do with the third major posited type of parallel universe which stipulates that our universe is a 4-dimensional membrane existing in within the 11+ dimensional metaverse posited by many QM theories, and that other membranes likely also exist, and may occasionally collide with our own, causing "big bangs" from the release of energy on impact.
Any one of those, or even all three, might exist, but so far as I know only the first is a necessary implication of currently accepted cosmological theory, and thus it has sort of inherited the "parallel universe" crown.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Why is this marked troll? I find it to be a valid statement. Just because someone doesn't agree with the prevailing theory doesn't mean they're trolling.
Different matter distributions == a universe in which said parallel universe which is inherently different than what we see around us.
I think there is some confusion over what "parallel" universe means. This is generally taken to be a universe which has been an exact parallel of our own universe up to some point after which it diverges i.e. everything is the same up to some point in time. In the quantum multiverse interpretation of QM this happens for each possible result of collapsing the wave function.
I've never heard of this ever being associated with multiple 'universes' from inflation because QM requires that the universes interact before they separate (this is how it explains the self interference of a single particle) whereas inflation requires that the universes be causally disconnected after their creation i.e. inflationary universes are just different universes, not parallel ones. So I think the author of the article got himself rather confused.