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FOR an experiment designed to assist us discover proof of different universes, it seems surprisingly modest. As Zoran Hadzibabic walks me into the lab, it feels extra like a classroom, full with linoleum flooring, fluorescent lighting and a whiteboard with scribbled equations. And but it’s right here, in amongst the tangle of stainless-steel chambers and brightly colored wires set on a raised platform, that researchers try to duplicate the primordial quantum effervescent that will have created our universe in an enormous multiverse.
The concept that our universe is only one of many is among the many most charming in physics, and the logic appears sound sufficient, within the sense that the thought is itself an outgrowth of extensively accepted theories about how the cosmos got here to be what we see at this time. However there additionally occurs to be zero empirical proof for its existence – which is the place Hadzibabic’s experiment on the College of Cambridge is available in.
The researchers are betting that if we will cool and manipulate potassium atoms to extraordinarily low temperatures, when tiny bubbles ought to kind spontaneously, we could have a proxy for the in any other case unobservable processes thought to have sired new universes. By finding out these bubbles, we might glean contemporary clues as to how any previous collisions between our universe and others would go away a mark that we would plausibly search out in astronomical information.
“Absolutely the dream can be that there’s one thing within the sky that we noticed which confirms what we predicted on this experiment,” says Matt Johnson, a theoretical physicist on the Perimeter Institute in Canada.
What’s the multiverse?
To be clear, what …