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."

Comments

Re:Except inflation

[Immerman]

> Yet even if they approach an infinite amount of space between each there will remain an gravitational attraction between all particles that will bring them back together given enough time, and will return to the original configuration before the explosion.

Not so. According to the currently widely accepted interpretation of Hubble observations the universe is not only expanding, but expanding at an ever-accelerating rate thanks to the influence of so-called dark energy. Under the influence of that effect - generally interpreted to be an expansion of the fabric of spacetime itself, the entire universe will expand exponentially long after the average density of both normal and dark matter is so close to zero as to make no difference, and the incredibly diffuse dark energy is effectively all that remains. The universe is destined to end not in a "big crunch", but as an eternally cold and empty void, with even the individual protons shed by long dead stars separated by such vast distances that they are no longer causally connected.