METRO
Thanks to Marvel, many of us are now familiar with the concept of multiverse theory – the idea that our universe is just one of countless parallel worlds, all existing simultaneously but impossible for us to ever see or reach.
Well, now we’ve wrapped our heads around that (sort of), things are about to get more confusing. Enter the anti-universe.
That’s right, the anti-universe – a mirror image of our universe running backwards in time from the point of the Big Bang.
That isn’t to say in another world your tomorrow has already happened, today is today and yesterday will be tomorrow.
But the idea that there is another version of our universe on the other side of the Big Bang helps explain a lot of issues thrown up by current thinking about that single moment of creation.
At present, the most widely-accepted theory is known as cosmological inflation.
Yes, inflation, we’ve all had enough of it.
But this was good inflation. It suggests that, a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the universe expanded exponentially fast. We know the universe is still expanding (what it is expanding into is a question for another day) but at 13.7billion years of age, it’s now moving at a much more sedate pace.
However, this theory does have a few holes in it, including that most mysterious of particles, dark matter – which the anti-universe could explain.
Speaking to New Scientist earlier this year, one of the brains behind the theory, physicist Dr Neil Turok, outlined how an anti-universe would work.
‘We know that the early universe was dominated by hot radiation,’ said Dr Turok. ‘This means that, if you rewind the clock from there, the size of the universe shrinks to zero in a very simple way. Mathematically, you can follow a straight line which cuts through the big bang. This allows us to extrapolate backwards to another “mirror image” copy of our universe on the other side of the big bang.
‘The two sides of the universe grow steadily in opposite directions away from the big bang, governed by the known laws of gravity and particle physics. The extreme simplicity of the large-scale universe, which is very smooth and flat, is a direct result of the simplicity of these laws…
