What is beyond all we see? Perhaps the question is inevitable. Nevertheless, some cosmologists have an answer: Our universe is a bubble of bubbles. Outside, there are more bubble damsels, all immersed in a rising and vibrant sea – the multi-tree.
The idea is polarizing. Some physicists accept the heterogeneity to explain why our bubble looks so special (only some bubbles can give life), while others reject the theory for without making any predictions (because it predicts every conceivable universe). But some researchers think they just haven’t been smart enough to figure out exactly what effect the theory would have yet.
Now, different teams are developing new ways to find out exactly how the bubbles multiply and what happens when these bubble bubbles burst.
“It’s a long shot,” said Jonathan Braden, a University of Toronto cosmologist involved in the effort, but, he said, he’s looking for evidence “for something you thought you couldn’t. never proved. ”
The heterogeneous concept came from attempts to understand the birth of our own universe. In the structure of the cosmos universe, theorists see signs of an explosive growth spurt during the childhood of the cosmos. In the early 1980s, as physicists studied how space could have begun – and stopped – to enter, a sad picture emerged. The researchers realized that although there may have been a place to stop it from entering here (in our bubble universe) and there (in other bubbles), it should your quantum effects continue with the majority of space, an idea known as perpetual inflation.
The difference between bubble damsels and their surroundings comes down to the energy of space itself. When space is as empty as possible and they cannot lose more energy, it is what physicists call an “true” empty state. Imagine a ball lying on the floor – it can’t fall any further. But systems can also have “false” empty states. Think of a ball in a bowl on board. The ball can roll around a little or more or less staying put. But a bolt big enough falls on the floor – in the very desert.
In the cosmological context, space can receive the same thing in an empty space state. A speck of false desert sometimes rests in a real desert (perhaps through a random quantum event), and this real desert disappears like a bubble bubble, capturing the desert’s excess energy. false, in a process called vacuum decay. It is this process that may have begun on our cosmos with a bang. “An empty bubble is probably the first event in the history of our universe,” said Hiranya Peiris, a cosmologist at University College London.
But physicists are struggling hard to predict how empty bubbles will behave. The future of a bubble depends on countless details that add up. Bubbles also change rapidly – their walls approach the speed of light as they fly out – and appear mechanical randomness and waviness. Different assumptions about these processes make controversial predictions, with no way of predicting what those would look like. It’s as if “you’ve taken a lot of things that are very difficult for physics to deal with and mushed them all together and they said, ‘Go ahead and work out what’s going on,'” said Braden.
Unable to protect empty bubbles in the multiples, physics has been looking for digital and physical analogs of them.
One group recently put out an empty bubble-like behavior out of a simple imitation. The researchers, including John Preskill, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, began with “the [most] a childish version of this problem you can imagine, ”co-author Ashley Milsted put it: a line of about 1,000 digital arrows that could point or go down. The point where a string of arrows almost met a series of downward arrows marked the wall of a bubble, and by whipping arrows, the researchers were able to make moving and hitting bubble walls. In some cases, this model symbolizes the behavior of more complex systems in nature. The researchers hoped to use it to simulate vacuum decay and bubble crashes.
At first the simple situation did not materialize. When the walls of a bubble collapsed, they reappeared perfectly, and there were none of the complex reflexes or outflow of grains (in the form of moving arrows tearing down the line). But after adding some mathematical success, the team saw battered walls spewing out energetic grains – with more grains appearing as the crashes became more violent.