New Evidence Suggests Ancient Civilizations Had Knowledge of the Multiverse

Marvel made the multiverse a blockbuster. A team in England pulled a multiverse out of a bishop's account of the universe, written 800 years ago. They ran his Latin through a computer, and it kept making universes, with his own almost lost among them, the way yours might be. A man was later burned alive with that idea among his heresies, and the team that ran it says the bishop had no idea it was in there. Left running, the program kept adding spheres long past nine. The universe the bishop actually described showed up only on what the team called an extremely thin sliver of the settings. Everything around that sliver was another cosmos. The bishop was Robert Grosseteste. In his short text about light, the universe starts as a single point of light that spreads out into the heavens, sphere inside sphere. Nine heavens and the elements made ten, and to him ten was a perfect number so that's where he stopped the team had turned that Latin into equations and handed it to a computer every time they changed a setting a different universe came out some had a handful of spheres some had none some had an infinite number in others in the team's own words the spheres were disordered and mixed up with each other the headline that went around the world called it a medieval multiverse then the team pushed back on its own headline we do not think that Robert Grosseteste anticipated the modern notion of the multiverse one of them wrote adding that commentators seem not to have read past their titles another member of the team put it the other way around the medieval multiverse was really the puzzle that Grosseteste creates the equations were his run them and the other universes come out whether he meant them or not he wasn't the first person to put other worlds in front of an audience either about five centuries before the bishop a Buddhist monk in China set up a room of mirrors he set ten of them around a statue of the Buddha and a torch when the torch was lit the room filled with reflections within reflections of the flame and the Buddha every image carrying the others inside it anyone standing in that room was looking at the Buddhist picture of the cosmos worlds inside worlds each one reflected inside the others Buddhist texts count a billion world systems in a single great system and they weren't the only ones counting one passage of the Talmud says that at night God rides a light cherub and flies through 18,000 worlds Paris tried to settle it by law the team's own paper linked the bishop's universes to article number 34 of a decree from Paris issued on the 7th of March 1277 that day the Bishop of Paris condemned 219 ideas in a single list anyone who taught them or even sat and listened while someone else did, faced being cut off from the church. In translation, one of them reads that the first cause cannot make many worlds. So the crime wasn't saying there are other worlds. The crime was saying God couldn't make them. A bishop doesn't ban that unless people in Paris were arguing about it, out loud, in the lecture halls. Somebody in that city must have been standing up and saying there could only ever be one world, and the church decided that was the dangerous position. for a while the church defended the idea that god could make more worlds a french scholar wrote a century later that god can and could in his omnipotence make another world besides this one and then in the same book that there would never be more than one a french physicist would later claim that the paris decree marked the birth of modern science three centuries after the decree that same church would send a man to the fire with countless worlds on his list of heresies before then the roman version of the idea had to be found again in january 1417 an italian book hunter went through a monastery library probably at fulda in germany and came out with an ancient roman poem he had a copy made and sent it to a friend more than 50 manuscripts that survive today come from that one copy a line in the poem says that in other realms there are still other worlds still other breeds of men two of the most famous writers of the renaissance owned copies and filled the margins with notes older greek thinkers had gone further with worlds without number some with neither sun nor moon destroyed by clashing one with another one historian wrote that the authorities tried to suppress the poem and failed back in the bishop's equations a universe that stops at a fixed number of spheres is in the team's words very much the exception physics ran into the same problem with the real universe centuries later and this time with a number it could measure. Even Carl Sagan ran into the old texts, on a broadcast in 1980. He told a television audience around the world that Hinduism was the only great faith whose timescales line up with modern cosmology. No doubt, he added, by accident. In the Bhagavata Purana, Brahma, the creator of our universe, says that unlimited universes pass through the pores of your body just as particles of dust pass through the openings of a screened window. In a later text, the Brahmas of other universes arrive all at once, some with ten heads, some with twenty, some with a hundred. Ours looks like a rabbit among many elephants. If it was an accident, it happened more than once. A Muslim theologian wrote, eight centuries ago, that God has the power to create a thousand thousand worlds beyond this one, each with its own heavens, sun, and moon. He called the arguments for a single world weak, flimsy. It happened in physics, too, with no scripture involved at all. A young physics student named Hugh Everett wrote a thesis about other worlds, worked out from the equations alone. His supervisor took it to Copenhagen and came back with the reaction. Your beautiful wave function formalism of course remains unshaken, he wrote. But all of us feel that the real issue is the words that are to be attached to the quantities. Another physicist dismissed the whole thing as theology. Everett cut his thesis down to a quarter of its original length. His committee accepted the short version in April 1957, with his talk of splitting worlds taken out. It went to print that summer. In the spring of 1959, he went to Copenhagen himself to make the case in person. Once there, he sat down with Niels Bohr. Bohr rejected his approach as a whole. Bohr's colleague wrote that Everett was indescribably stupid and could not understand the simplest things in quantum mechanics. Everett later called the visit a hell, doomed from the beginning. Bohr didn't move an inch. He spent part of that trip in his hotel, working out a method for a completely different problem, which tells you roughly how the meetings were going. He never went back to quantum physics. To avoid boot camp, he had already taken a job at the Pentagon, and his first project there was calculating how many people would die from radioactive fallout in a nuclear war. Later he advised on choosing targets for hydrogen bombs. His thesis was about other worlds, and his working life went to calculating how this one could end. The idea went up into the sky without him. A European space telescope mapped the oldest light there is and pinned down a cold spot spread across a patch of sky that is much larger than expected. A scientist on the mission said of the oddities they'd found, They are real and we have to look for a credible explanation. The spot is only about 0.00015 degrees colder than the sky around it, a difference you couldn't feel between two glasses of water spread across that oversized patch of sky. If a bruise like that came from another universe, then something out there has already touched ours. Giordano Bruno had said as much out loud. It cost him his life. On the 22nd of May, 1592, in Venice, a nobleman denounced his own houseguest to the Inquisition. The guest was Bruno, a philosopher who had written that the universe holds an infinite number of solar systems like our own. Rome asked Venice to hand him over that September, and by January, Venice had agreed. He spent the next seven years in the Inquisition's hands. Two churchmen drew up eight heretical propositions against him, and that list is lost. His books went onto the list of banned works. One historian calls it a myth that he died for believing in other worlds. But an eyewitness wrote down the heresies, and the first one reads, that worlds are innumerable. When the sentence was read, Bruno told his judges, Perchance you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it. On the 17th of February, 1600, they led him into the Campo de Fiori in Rome with his tongue held in a bridle so he couldn't speak, and they burned him alive. As he was dying, he turned his face away from the crucifix. The man who said worlds are innumerable wasn't allowed a last word. Even the detailed records of his trial are gone, lost when Napoleon's men ransacked the Vatican archive. Almost three centuries later, a statue of Bruno went up on that spot, with an inscription that reads to Bruno from the age he foresaw here where the fire burned the vatican's answer was to close its own museum and tell churches to shut their doors and it called the crowd that came to see it go up an atheistic mob the pope wrote that the statue's purpose was to insult the papacy it's still standing and in this century physicists thought they had finally caught the multiverse on camera one march morning a physicist knocked on the door of Andre Linde who had spent 30 years on the theory of how the universe inflated to tell him the signal had been found someone beside Linde guessed it was a delivery and asked did you order anything linda said yeah i ordered it 30 years ago finally it arrived he wondered out loud a moment later what if i am tricked what if i believe in this just because it is beautiful the doorstep video had 1.2 million views within a day and linda said what it meant if inflation is there then the multiverse is there to the critics he said that anyone claiming the multiverse had no experimental confirmation had not paid enough attention a critic fired back that in this picture anything can happen and does happen infinitely many times the answer came back the next january a joint analysis with the European Space Telescope said, we have not been able to confirm that the signal is an imprint of cosmic inflation. Dust in our own galaxy was as strong as the signal itself. But the cold spot hadn't gone anywhere. And back in England, a different team went looking for something ordinary to explain it. They surveyed 7,000 galaxies, looking for a huge empty void that could have cooled the light. They didn't find one. The voids we have detected cannot explain the cold spot under standard cosmology, the lead author said. Under standard cosmology, the odds of the spot being a fluke came out at 1 in 50. A member of the team said that if it held up, the cold spot might be taken as the first evidence for the multiverse, and billions of other universes may exist like our own. That claim came out of the same city where a computer had pulled universes out of the Bishop's Latin years before. By then, physics already had a different kind of test on the books. a single number in our own universe, and a journal editor who objected to publishing papers about it. Not everyone was ready to call any of this science. Two prominent cosmologists warned that physics risked becoming a no man's land between mathematics, physics, and philosophy. The imprimatur of science, they wrote, should be awarded only to a theory that is testable, and they demanded a conference to defend physics. Stephen Hawking didn't like it either. I have never been a fan of the multiverse," he said. If the scale of different universes in the multiverse is large or infinite, the theory can't be tested. His final paper, submitted for publication before his death, tried to tame it into a universe that's reasonably smooth and globally finite. And it named its own test, ripples in space from the very beginning that a future detector might pick up. Even so, his own verdict on it was, we are not down to a single unique universe, but our findings imply a significant reduction of the multiverse. When the paper came out, his co-author said, now we're saying that there is a boundary in our past. He also said Hawking had come to feel his most famous book was written from the wrong perspective. His co-author went further and described the other universes himself. Most of them, he said, were crap, lifeless, sterile. On Hawking's own team, the other universes were being described like places someone had been to look at. A survey published this May asked about 1700 physicists what explains a universe that seems fine-tuned for life. Design got 3%. The multiverse got several times that. And this week, a physicist wrote that although the multiverse sounds like science fiction, it is a real scientific prediction. The people who believe in it have their own way of hedging. Martin Rees said he was confident enough to bet his dog's life on it. Andrei Linde said he'd bet his own life. And Steven Weinberg said he had just enough confidence to bet the lives of both Andrei Linde and Martin Rees' dog. Everett never saw any of it. Hugh Everett died of a heart attack at home on the 19th of July, 1982. He was 51. He had asked for his remains to be thrown out with the trash. His wife kept the urn for a few years, and then she did what he asked. His son, who found out only later how much his father's work had mattered, said, I didn't really have any relationship with him. That June, his daughter Elizabeth had tried to take her own life. Whenever it heard, he looked up from his newspaper and said, I didn't know she was that sad. She died by suicide in 1996. In her purse was a note. Please sprinkle me in water or the garbage. Maybe that way I'll end up in the correct parallel universe with daddy. Her father had been gone for 14 years. By then, Steven Weinberg had turned the idea into a number, from the energy built into empty space. This value can't be too large and positive, he wrote, because then galaxies and stars would not form. Without some other explanation, it would have to cancel out to 56 decimal places. That's two strangers each writing down a 56-digit number and getting every digit the same. Weinberg's answer was that there are countless universes with countless values, and we can only find ourselves in one where galaxies can form. He and two colleagues worked out the odds in detail about ten years on. The journal's editor objected to publishing papers like that. Then astronomers watching exploding stars found that the universe's expansion is speeding up, and the value they measured landed where his reasoning said it could. The astronomers who found it won a Nobel Prize. Run the bishop's universe again, and his nine spheres come out on a thin sliver, surrounded by cosmos after cosmos that isn't ours. And in that paper, the team that said he had no idea wrote, Following the same logic as modern cosmologists, we are forced to conclude that some additional physical law is at work. The example they gave was the same reasoning Weinberg used for our own universe. The old texts drew that picture without a single equation. A creator who calls himself a small creature measuring seven spans of my own hand, and universes drifting through the body of God like dust. The idea they hunted, cut, burned, and threw in the trash is the one physics now reaches for to explain why the universe you live in exists at all. The bishop stopped at nine spheres because ten was a perfect number, and his equations, left running, keep adding them.