Have we found empirical evidence that we live in a multiverse? Gotta love when this happens.

Some of you may recall the article we posted just the other day about super-voids (areas of space which are devoid of stars, galaxies, and other forms of matter). These regions were initially discovered when mapping the cosmic microwave background radiation (the leftover remnants of the big bang that was born when the universe was a mere 380, 000 years old). This background radiation should be evenly dispersed throughout the universe. Instead, physicists noted a huge cold spot in the constellation of Eridanus (almost one billion light-years in diameter). This cold spot is very minute temperature-wise, but perplexing nonetheless. Many theories surfaced that attempted to explain the discrepancy; some of these theories include "universe-in-mass' black holes, a change in texture from a transition the universe underwent when it was very young, the super-void hypothesis, and evidence of a parallel universe. The last controversial theory was cooked up by Laura Mersini-Houghton, who subsequently made five predictions about the nature of this cold spot, in hopes of vindicating the existence of a multiverse. A landscape multiverse, to be more specific, is something that is inherently tied to the multiple dimensions of string theory in relation to the principles that must be met in order for life to develop. In this scenario, our universe is but one in a massively huge number of universes. Just one in a INFINITE number of infinitely large universes--hurts your head, doesn't it? Out of those five predictions made in her paper (and that of her team) entitled "Cosmological Avatars of the Landscape I: Bracketing the SUSY Breaking Scale" (read it here: http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0611223 ) 4 have been verified. Here they are as follows: 1. One of her predictions said that no evidence of supersymmetry (one of the hallmarks of string theory, which postulates the existence of a corresponding "super-particle" for all elementary particles that have an integer-valued spin) would be found at the Large Hadron Collider. No evidence was acquired that gave supersymmetry leeway. (we did find the Higgs boson!) 2. She was also one of the first scientists that believed dark flow (an eery observation that shows distant clusters being "pulled at" from some great force that is outside the vicinity of our local universe) was not tied to the great attractor, but something different...something pulling at our universe from another universe would suffice. In essence, perhaps another universe tugging at our own? 3. Instead of finding that the temperature variations in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation are random, a preferential pattern should be obvious. Upon inspection, we saw that instead of being completely at random, these "lumps," which are slightly warmer or slightly cooler than the surrounding

temperatures, formed through quantum fluctuations in the early years of the universe, the blotches are aligned with each other - along what has been dubbed the "axis of evil." The so-called "preferred" direction of energy fluctuations. This could essentially mean that we are off about portions of our understanding of the big bang. (it could be that our universe's shape is much stranger than anyone ever imagined OR, the big bang was not the beginning of everything, but just our beginning...?) 4 & 5. The team suggested that voids could be found that are lacking in stars and galaxies formed as a result of a sister universe pushing against us, repelling the gravity and matter of our own universe. If one was found, a similar void should follow in the opposite hemisphere.. two things that rang true. The first of which, was the Eranus supervoid, which we covered recently. The second one in the opposite hemisphere was found very recently. Could this mean we have finally seen some empirical evidence that we live in a multiverse? Maybe. Envisioning the Multiverse: Lets say our universe is a part of a larger number of multiple universes, our universe most likely formed through a bubble in another universe, created through quantum fluctuations within the vacuum energy (maybe an infinite number of them formed this way too), spawning a universe equipped with its own laws of physics, energy levels, matter concentrations, arrow of time, and entropy level. Some of these said bubbles could collapse in on themselves before undergoing something similar to inflation, with only a certain number of them progressing beyond that point, depending on the characteristics the baby bubble developed early on. After the bubble stabilizes, it would effectively be cut off from the universe it was born into, losing all of the information from it, but hypothetically could interact gravitationally to the other universe, which is exactly what Houghton thinks happened in the cold spot in the CMBR -- a seemingly area of space with an imprint of another universe apart from our own. It's even possible that in theory, another bubble is developing in our universe. Though I remain highly skeptical. This could very well help explain why our universe appears to be fine-tuned for life from our perspective. After all, if an infinite number of universes exist, an infinite number of them would have each and every characteristic our universe has, with an infinite number of them that are radically different than ours. Can you imagine living in a universe where the arrow of time runs backward, with gravity acting as a repellant force? Whilst living in a multiverse, it's conceivable that such a universe can and does exist. In fact, it's quantum mechanics in action. When internal inflation, string theory, Copenhagen interpretation, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle are thrown into the mix, we get a universe (our universe) created at the whim of a wave function, collapsing with the properties our universe has. - Jaime Further Reading: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php? fbid=460338017385946&set=a.313338668752549.73826.313312622088487&type=1&theater The Universe According to Planck: http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=51554 "Time and the Multiverse:" http://fqxi.org/community/articles/display/135 "Laura Mersini-Houghton- Thoughts on Defining the Multiverse:" http://www.slashdocs.com/kzszm/laura-mersini-houghton-thoughts-on-defining-the-multiverse.html "The Universe: The new Axis of Evil :" http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-universe-the-new-axis-of-evil-465199.html