My interest in Astronomy covers all aspects of this very large topic 😉
One of the largest if not the largest question to be asked in nature is where did it all begin: space the universe, galaxies, stars, planets and us?
Here is an interesting article that to briefly explains the big question and latest theorised answer.
Big Bang theorists ask ‘what came before the Big Bang?’. The standard answer is that there was nothing at all.
Normally we are quite comfortable with the idea of ‘nothing’. We are conditioned by experience to think of nothing as being an absence of something within a given area, but if space itself was created in the Big Bang, there can’t be ‘nothing’ because there’s nowhere to put the ‘something’ that doesn’t exist. Asking what came before the Big Bang is equally meaningless because ‘time’ was created along with space – you can’t have a ‘before’ because time didn’t exist.
For a species that experiences the world by interacting with time and space, that’s a slightly uncomfortable, brain-blending concept.
Luckily (depending on your point of view) there are physicists who believe that, far from being the beginning of all things, the Big Bang was just the moment our Universe burst from the womb of a parent universe – just one offspring of a much larger multiverse.
The idea that our Universe is just one of countless others might seem (at best) incredible and (at worst) delusional, but remember this: we once thought our planet was unique; then we thought our solar system was unique and, after that, we thought our galaxy was unique – is it such a stretch to imagine that our Universe isn’t as unique as we like to believe?
One of the problems with our Universe being ‘the’ Universe is that it seems a little too perfect. It is a Universe where the laws of physics are perfectly tuned for the creation of stars, galaxies, planets and life – if just one aspect of those laws was different, then the Universe as we know it wouldn’t exist.
It is the same problem we once had with our planet. Looked at in isolation, the Earth seems to have been perfectly ‘designed’ for the creation of life – just the right distance from just the right sort of star with just the right atmosphere and just the right sort of magnetic field (and so on). Of course we now know that there are countless other planets out there where conditions aren’t perfect and where life doesn’t exist. We were just the winners in the planetary lottery.
The multiverse would solve the problem of our ‘perfect’ Universe in the same way. Just as the Earth won the planetary lottery, our Universe won the cosmological lottery. It seems ‘perfect’ because the conditions within it allowed us to evolve and marvel at its perfection. But there are countless other universes where conditions weren’t just right.
You can compare it a game of cards. If you were allowed to pull just one card from the deck, the chances of pulling out the card you were looking for is quite small, but, if you were allowed to go through the whole deck, its discovery becomes inevitable. The same applies to the multiverse, with infinite permutations of the laws of physics available, it is inevitable that one would be perfect for life.
In many ways, a multiverse is a more comfortable concept to get to grips with than a perfect universe born from the void. Of course, eventually you have to ask where the first of these ancestor universe’s came from and you are right back where you started – brain-blend.
