How to build a multiverse
Could black holes birth new universes?
1 Black hole
One theory is that black holes are responsible for creating new universes.
5 Feeding
One version suggests that material sucked in by the black hole ‘feeds’ the new universe.
2 Rip
This theory suggests the singularity can rip a hole in the universe, perhaps when it collapses.
6 Inflation
The new universe rapidly expands in a period we call cosmic inflation.
3 Event horizon
In this region of the black hole, gravity is so intense that nothing can escape its pull.
7 Death
The black hole collapses, leaving behind the new universe.
4 Singularity
Inside a black hole is a peasized singularity, where gravity is essentially infinite.
8 Physics
Each new universe would form with its own laws of physics, and only some would survive.
9 Controversy
This is only a theory at the moment. There is no direct evidence that this actually happens.
space, those particles must repeat arrangements as large as entire solar systems and galaxies. So your entire life might be repeated elsewhere in the universe, down to what you ate for breakfast yesterday. At least, that’s thought to be the theory.
But if the universe began at a finite point – as nearly every modern physicist agrees it did – an alternate version of you likely doesn’t exist, at least according to astrophysicist Ethan Siegel. As Siegel explains, “the number of possible outcomes from particles in any universe interacting with one another tends towards infinity faster than the number of possible universes increases due to inflation. So what does this mean for you?” Siegel posits. “It means it’s up to you to make this universe count.”
In a relatively recent addition to the pantheon of multiverse theories, researchers from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo,
Ontario, have proposed that the universe began at the Big Bang, and on the opposite side of the Big Bang timeline, stretching backwards in time, a universe once existed that was the exact mirror image of our own.
“Instead of saying that there was a different universe before the Big Bang, we’re saying that the universe before the Big Bang is actually, in some sense, an image of the universe after the Big Bang,” Neil Turok, a Perimeter Institute researcher, says. That means everything – protons, electrons and even actions like cracking an egg – would be reversed. Antiprotons and positively charged electrons would make up atoms, while eggs would uncrack and make their way back inside chickens. Eventually, that universe would shrink down, presumably to a singularity, before expanding out into our own universe. Seen another way, both universes were created at the
Big Bang and exploded simultaneously backwards and forwards in time.
Countless works of myth and fiction draw from ideas of parallel universes and the multiverse. Overlapping worlds make appearances in Norse mythology, as well as in Buddhist and Hindu cosmology. The idea of multiple universes coming into contact showed up in print as early as Edwin A. Abbott’s novella Flatland: A Romance of Many
Dimensions in 1884, and can still be seen in recent media, such as the 2016 Marvel film Doctor
Strange. An entire genre of Japanese light novels, manga, anime and video games, called isekai, deals with characters transported to parallel worlds. Nearly every Star Trek series incorporates some form of mirror universe, and the 2009 reboot film starring Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto took subsequent Star Trek movies into an entirely new timeline that explicitly branches off from the original series. Many comics, as well as their corresponding movies, delve deeply into the idea of parallel worlds. Recent Marvel storylines – in film, TV and in print – DC’s Flashpoint arc and 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse all explore multiple universes and the intersections between them.
“We’re saying that the universe before the Big Bang is actually, in some sense, an image of the universe after the Big Bang
Neil Turok