Big Bangs theory may rewrite rulebook, says Astronomer Royal

THERE may have been more than one Big Bang, the Astronomer Royal has said, as he suggested the world could be on the brink of a discovery as profound as Copernicus learning the Earth revolved around the Sun.

Lord Rees also said that other universes may exist which are unconstrained by the laws of Newtonian physics, with different atoms and gravitational fields.

“Many people suspect that our Big Bang was not the only one, but there’s a whole ensemble of Big Bangs, a whole archipelago of Big Bangs,” he told The Hay Literary Festival in Wales.

“This raises another question. Even though the laws of physics are the same everywhere we can see in our observable region, if physical reality is far more extensive, then maybe there are domains where the laws are different.

“This has some interesting implications. It could be that the different Big Bangs cool down with different gravity, different atoms etc and then what we call the laws of physics will, in this grander perspective, be just parochial bylaws in our cosmic patch, governed maybe by some deeper set of laws, but just environmental accidents.

“Maybe we are due for a further Copernican revolution and say there are many Big Bangs and some are tuned for life and others are not. This is a speculation but it is a very exciting one.”

The Big Bang, a huge explosion that created matter and time, is thought to have occurred 14 billion years ago, but some think that the universe is far older, maybe as old as 986 billion years.

The theory that there were multiple Big Bangs as part of a wider “multiverse” was first proposed by Prof Andrei Linde, now at Stanford University, and is still highly controversial, but Lord Rees said he would “bet his dog” on it being true.

The Astronomer Royal also said that the universe may be far larger than we can see and so large that it could eventually repeat, meaning other Earths exist We have reason for thinking the universe we observe goes on much further, almost certainly one thousand times further and maybe so much further that all cosmological options are repeated,” he said. “There may be a lecture like this where people are listening and we may all have avatars.

“It may be some comfort that way beyond our horizon you have an avatar that makes the right decision whenever you make a wrong one. That’s a possibility.”