And even for one of the brightest minds of our time, the calculations are extremely complex. Hawking and Hertog describe their preliminary theory as a “toy model,” or one that significantly simplifies the real world to make the calculations easier. Such a model wouldn’t necessarily reflect the universe as we see it. No one said theoretical physics was easy.
Many Universes
Stephen Hawking’s last paper is titled “A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation?” It tackles the idea of a multiverse, a vast collection of universes that exist simultaneously, though they’re spread out almost unimaginably far from each other. Multiverses arose, the theory goes, because of something called inflation. In the fractions of a second after our universe emerged, space-time expanded at an immense rate. As it did so, tiny quantum fluctuations expanded to become the large-scale features of the universe we observe today, and which serve as evidence that the theory might be true.
Under a variation of the theory that Hawking and Hertog work with, called eternal inflation, this inflation continues forever in most places, but, in some patches, it stops. Where it stops, universes form — our own and others, in a repeating process that never ends. In these universes, the laws of physics all look different, meaning constants we take for granted like the speed of light would vary between them.
“Eternal inflation creates an infinite number of patch universes, little bubble universes, all over the place with this inflating space between them,” says Will Kinney, a professor of physics at University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences.
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