Eternal Inflation and the Multiverse

Figure 1 from Andrei Linde’s paper “Brief History of the Multiverse”. Each blob represents a pocket universe, occupying a different region of space, and being born at a different time during eternal inflation. A particular pocket universe may be connected to its parent by some sort of bridge, or that connection may have broken or decayed. Different pocket universes will have different physics.

“Inflationary cosmology therefore suggests that, even though the observed universe is incredibly large, it is only an infinitesimal fraction of the entire universe” states Alan Guth, the original father of the inflationary Big Bang, in his article from 2007, “Eternal inflation and its implications”.

Inflation is the very brief – yet extremely significant – period in our own universe’s history, perhaps of duration only a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. During the inflation event, a very submicroscopic bubble of energy and space expanded tremendously, doubling in scale perhaps 100 times or more in each of the 3 spatial dimensions. That’s an increase in volume of around 90 factors of 10! This inflationary epoch drove the universe to become macroscopic in scale, and also to become highly homogeneous and topologically flat at large scales.

The inflationary Big Bang models solved a number of outstanding problems in cosmology, such as the horizon problem and the flatness problem. Basically at large scales we see a homogeneous and topologically flat universe in all directions. Without inflation, parts of the universe seen on opposite ends of the sky would never have been casually connected. However, with the inflation models, those regions were originally within each others’ casually connected ‘light cones’, prior to the inflation phase, before it pushed them out to much larger physical scale, at which point they become highly separated.

Andrei Linde is another one of the fathers of inflationary Big Bang theory, and the originator of the chaotic inflation models. Chaotic inflation, and another leading model, ‘new’ inflation, both appear to result in eternal inflation; this gives rise to the multiverse scenario. That is, inflation keeps going in most of space, while multiple universes form and separate from the inflation process.

The multiverse scenario states that our universe is only one of a very large number of universes, and in such a case, our particular universe may be referred to as a ‘mini-universe’ or ‘pocket universe’. Of course our universe is already enormously large, it’s just that the multiverse is giaganormously larger than that. With eternal inflation the multiverse keeps inflating in other regions, portions of which will later settle out into other ‘pocket universes’.

Linde has recently published a summary “A Brief History of the Multiverse” which describes the developments in inflationary Big Bang theory and models for the multiverse since 1982. I encourage those who are interested in multiverses to read his paper.

With this eternal inflation our universe was (most likely) not the first, it was just one of many and inflation has been going on for a very long time. Inflation would continue forever into the future. New mini-universes would continue to be spawned and settle out from the overall inflation. It appears that eternal inflation is not eternal into the past, however, just into the future (see Guth paper referenced below).

Each of these mini-universes could have different values of the fundamental physical parameters. This ties into string theory models which admit of a very large number of possibilities for physical parameters.

Some sets of these parameters are favorable to life, but many (most) would not be. In order to get life as we know it we need carbon and other heavy elements, formed in stars (and not during the Big Bang nucleosynthesis), and we need a long-lived mini-universe. Other mini-universes might have different values of dark matter and dark energy than in our own universe. This could lead to very short lifetimes with no chance to form galaxies and stars.

Sidebar: These models are motivated by string theory and inflationary cosmology. It makes more sense in this context to think of ‘mini-universes’ rather than ‘parallel universes’ that often get popularized in discussions of quantum physics e.g. the Many Worlds discussions. Sorry to break the news to you, but there is not another you in each of these other mini-universes, since, even though they are endless in number, they all have different physical conditions and different histories.

References

Guth, Alan 2007. “Eternal Inflation and its Implications” http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0702178

Linde, Andrei 2015. “Brief History of the Multiverse” http://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.01203.pdf