END OF THE MULTIVERSE THEORY?

The universe, by definition, contains everything we can see. That’s not just what we can see with our eyes, but everything within range of our telescopes and other scientific instruments. The universe is what astronomers study, but there’s one sub-branch of astronomy – cosmology – which specifically deals with the structure and evolution of the universe on the largest possible scales. The aim of cosmologists is to seek out the simplest theory which adequately explains everything we can see. But the subject took an unexpected turn during the 1980s when that ‘simplest theory’ began to look distinctly bizarre. It implied the existence of an infinite number of other universes – some very similar to our own, others so different they don’t even obey the same laws of physics. According to this theory we live in an unimaginably vast multiverse, of which the whole of the visible universe is merely an infinitesimally small part.

The idea was controversial, to say the least. Some people loved it – the sci-fi community, for example, which had already been talking about ‘parallel universes’ for decades. In fact, Isaac Asimov’s classic novel The Gods