Written by: Safal Gautam - 22016, Grade XII
Posted on: 09 March, 2022
We are all familiar, I say too familiar with the multiverse theory. I mean, most movies or netflix series in the past few years have started to implement and create their own idea of multiverse. Even before now, the multiverse was already coined in 1895 by William James, an American Philosopher. Instead of boring you with facts that can be known by just simple search in any search engines, the first time most normal people ever heard or came to know about multiverse may be due to the fictions of writers who create their own universe than come up with alternate realities of their own created universe then combine all of it to create their own multiverse. Popular fictional multiverse we all may be familiar with may be the Spider-verse, The Marvel-Verse, DC-verse and many other mainstream and non stream multiverse that I will not explain at all as almost all who are familiar with the terms above are already familiar with what happens in the respective universe.What I am going to discuss is the actual idea of how it may be theoretically possible. First of all,the whole idea of knowing about the whole idea of the multiverse was extremely annoying and complicated. We all know that when you try to learn something, new terms regarding the said topic always tend to come up which we will have no base knowledge of at all. Then when you try to know what those terms mean, you come in contact with other new terms which will repeat so much that I will keep on going further away from actually what I want to know. But, as I kept going on, the terms that I found annoying at first became very cool as it all started to connect it all. Keeping it as easy to understand for everyone, the multiverse theory according to legitimate sources has 4 levels.
Now who may have diagnosed the multiverse into 4 levels. It was actually Max Tegmark, a Swedish-American cosmologist and physicist. He even has his own website which is entitled “The Universe of Max Tegmark”. The terms there are complicated but the whole idea is very interesting and not so controversial. I have also taken references from “Tegmark, M, 2003. Parallel Universes. Journal of Scientific American'' General theory suggests that the universe is essentially infinitely big and contains matter at roughly the same distribution as we see it throughout the universe. Matter can combine in only so many different configurations. So, given an infinite amount of space, it stands to reason there exists another portion of the universe in which an exact duplicate of our world exists. This is what Tegmark’s 1st level of Multiversal Theory suggests in the most simplest way I could ever explain. The level is titled as Beyond Our Cosmic Universe or Regions Beyond Cosmic Horizon. To understand the Second level, we must know about Inflation theory. Simply Inflation theory describes a hypothetical event that occurred when our universe was less than a second old. Individual universes can basically separate a small part of themselves creating larger expanding universes filled with numerous individual universes which come into being with the passage of time. Separate universes come forth like bubbles of spacetime which undergo their own form of expansion, under the rules dictated by the above inflation theory. This is the 2nd Level of Multiversal Theory which also suggests that the laws of physics on such a universe may very well differ from our own. Thus gaining its Title, Post Inflation Bubble Universe. The 3rd level, entitled ‘Quantum Many Worlds’ suggests that, “Quantum many Worldsmultiverse is right around us and is a product of the interpretation of the quantum mechanics and this multiverse theory specifies the state of the universe, not in classical terms as in the other theories but in terms of the mathematical object called the wave function”(Tegmark, 2003). This is a more complicated type of Multiverse which is quite difficult to explain. According to this approach to quantum physics, events unfold in every single possible way, just in different universes. Though it's quite hard to understand, almost all fictional stories we are familiar with like ‘Loki’ Series, ‘Spider-verse’ and even the new ‘No Way Home’ movie implements the third level of Multiverse making it well known to anything outside physics. It was even hinted at during the Wanda-Vision events and ‘Avengers: Endgame’. So, if people are very informed about the events of these stories, they are already familiar with the 3rd level of the Multiverse. Level 4 is way more complicated as it involves the theories of other mathematical structures and changes in the entire principles and working of the said Universes while not only the change in rules like the 2nd level of Multiverse.
Finally, Not only Max Tegmark but also another physicist, Brian Greene has presented his own ideas of the multiverse in his Book, The Hidden Reality. There are also other people who have explained what these two found in very simple ways. Like PewDiePie, who first introduced me to Max Tegmark’s theory about 5 months ago. I would really suggest interested people to go through the topic as it will definitely help broaden our view towards the vague topic of Multiverse.
