The Universes

After toying with some ideas about magnetism, I found myself treading the familiar path of scientific day-dreaming. Here's a little discussion on my train of thought:

It's separately postulated that there have been, and will be, different universes (before the Big Bang, and after the eventual collapse) and that there may be other universes within a higher "multiverse". These ideas seem to me to be the same thing. Since the Big Bang itself created our version of spacetime, there is nothing to suggest that there is a pattern of linear causation in a hypothetical multiverse. From our perspective, those "once and future" realities can't exist, but perhaps outside of our spacetime they do. If spacetime is not the only reality, then there's nothing to suggest these universes cannot exist concurrently.

It's very tempting to believe some of the ideas in the Cyclic Model relating to a self-sustaining pattern of universes creating universes, perhaps just by collision, but these cosmogonies are so far beyond testability that at this stage it's perhaps an indulgent course of study. You could almost say that at our current stage of scientific capability such hypotheses have about as much value as any religious theory on the origins of reality. But science has come so far in the last few centuries that it doesn't seem too ridiculous to at least explore some of the possibilities based on what little we do know. That may give us time to perfect the questions before we have the means to answer them.

This might all sound like Science Fiction, and there are many people who balk at retaining knowledge about the Universe (as Douglas Adams said, "the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion"!), but I find these mysteries utterly fascinating. Often the proposed solutions have a grace and elegance redolent of grand poetry or the religious texts themselves. The Cyclic Model, String Theory, Curved Spacetime; they may have-dry sounding names, but the ideas are stunningly simple and beautiful. I just wish that nature actually followed Ockham's Razor in this way. Often, the best provable scientific theories are far from simple, or even elegant.