How many universes are there

Robert Lawrence Kuhn is the creator, writer and host of " Closer to Truth ," a public television series and online resource that features the world's leading thinkers exploring humanity's deepest questions. Kuhn is co-editor, with John Leslie, of " " (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). This article is based on a "Closer to Truth" episode produced and directed by Peter Getzels and streamed at www.closertotruth.com . Kuhn contributed this article to Space.com's . Since childhood, I've obsessed about existence. What is existence? What's the extent of existence? What's the purpose of existence? Now, six decades on, having explored many things, I'm no surer (and feeling no smarter), but I continue my pursuit. What's the largest, surest fact about existence that I can know with confidence? For me, it's the vastness of the cosmos. The universe is huge, but it is only with recent discoveries that we can realize how inconceivably immense the universe, or multiple universes, may actually be. The multiverse If we define "universe" as "all there is" or "all that exists," then obviously, by definition, there can be only one universe. But if we define "universe" as "all we can ever see" (no matter how large our telescopes) or "space-time regions that expand together," then many universes may indeed exist. There is nothing in science more awesome, more majestic. To discern the nature of ultimate reality, one must begin with the challenge of multiple universes. So what is a "multiverse"? As physicis...

While the universe we live in is something that we do not know much about and are working to better understand each day, researchers and figures in the world of science are always putting different hypotheses and things of that nature forth. One of those would be Sir Roger Penrose and his thoughts are quite interesting. For those who might not know Sir Roger Penrose is from the University of Oxford and as the title suggests has won a Nobel Prize. Penrose believes that based on his findings that there was something before our universe, before the big bang. This suggesting that perhaps there was another universe present before our own. Basically in the way that Penrose sees it a universe will continue to expand until it eventually ‘decays’ and from there a new universe will come forth and take its place. I know, all of this might sound confusing but overall it’s quite interesting to learn about. Futurism wrote as follows on this and what Penrose believes overall: “We have a universe that expands and expands, and all mass decays away, and in this crazy theory of mine, that remote future becomes the Big Bang of another aeon,” he said, according to The Telegraph. Basically, Penrose’s theory would suggest that black holes are much more than most would assume. This raising the question as to how many universes there may have been in the past or if this concept is even true or somehow provable at all. While ‘Hawking radiation’ has not been confirmed just yet, perhaps in the future...

A Hubble Space Telescope image of GN-z11 (inset), one of the most-distant galaxies ever seen, superimposed on another image to show the galaxy’s location in the sky. Recent observations of GN-z11 by the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed hints that this galaxy harbors Population III stars—the first generation of stars to form in cosmic history. Credit: The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was built primarily to transform our understanding of the early universe. Less than a year after it was switched on, it is delivering, finding galaxies earlier in the universe In a pair of papers posted on the preprint server arXiv.org, two teams of astronomers report promising signs of Population III stars. In the first study, led by Roberto Maiolino of the University of Cambridge, researchers think they Once the universe had cooled and calmed sufficiently about 400,000 years after the big bang, the first atoms were able to form: hydrogen and helium. These atoms would have clumped together into immense clouds under gravity and eventually formed Population III stars. Unhindered by competition from other stars, these stars may have grown to huge sizes within these clumps—at least hundreds or even thousands of times more massive than our sun. This bulk meant the stars were short-lived, exhausting their fuel and exploding as supernovae within just a few million years. Yet those explosions were vital to the universe. They released heavier elements that had formed inside the stars, such...

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The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Our universe might be really, really big — but finite. Or it might be infinitely big. Both cases, says physicist Brian Greene, are possibilities, but if the latter is true, so is another posit: There are only so many ways matter can arrange itself within that infinite universe. Eventually, matter has to repeat itself and arrange itself in similar ways. So if the universe is infinitely large, it is also home to infinite parallel universes. Does that sound confusing? Try this: Think of the universe like a deck of cards. "Now, if you shuffle that deck, there's just so many orderings that can happen," Greene says. "If you shuffle that deck enough times, the orders will have to repeat. Similarly, with an infinite universe and only a finite number of complexions of matter, the way in which matter arranges itself has to repeat." Greene, the author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos, tackles the existence of multiple universes in his latest book, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. Recent discoveries in physics and astronomy, he says, point to the idea that our universe may be one of many universes populating a grander multiverse. "You almost can't avoid having some version of the multiverse in your studies if you push deeply enough in the mathematical descriptions of the physical universe," he says. "There are many of us thinking of one version of parallel universe theor...

There are dark places out there in the deep universe, vast Saharas hundreds of millions of light years across, empty except for a stray hydrogen atom or a bit of radiation. They are the cosmic voids, and they will someday grow to consume the entire To understand At these truly cosmological scales, we see an amazing structure emerge. Galaxies in our universe are not scattered about randomly like salt spilled on the table; instead, they form the largest pattern found in nature. We see dense The Virgo Cluster is a large cluster of galaxies in the constellation Virgo. Comprising approximately 1,300 (and possibly up to 2,000) member galaxies, the cluster forms the heart of the larger Virgo Supercluster, of which the Local Group (containing our Milky Way galaxy) is a member. Getty Images We call this immensity the “cosmic web.” It’s made of galaxies in much the same way as your body is made of microscopic cells. But that metaphor can only go so far; to make a proper scale model of the cosmic web, your cells would have to be a million times smaller than they are. Today, voids make up over 80 percent of the volume of the universe, yet contain less than a tenth of its total mass. But while the lights of the stars and galaxies of the cosmic web stand out, those structures only serve to set the boundaries of the true masters of the cosmos: the empty regions between them. First discovered in the early 1980s, these cosmic voids dominate the volume of the universe. In other words, most ...