"The multiverse is a concept about which we know frighteningly little." These words from Dr. Strange to Peter Parker in the recently released Spider-Man: Never Go Home are not absolutely incorrect. Last week, too, the Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness teaser teased this concept of multiple universes.
So is there any scientific support for this fantasy? While some physicists have proposed that our universe may be just one of many realities, others say this is nothing more than speculation.
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Sabine Hossenfelder, a German theoretical physicist has an interesting take on the multiverse. In a video published in 2019 on her YouTube channel, she says that “believing in the multiverse concept is logically equivalent to believing in God. Therefore, it is religion, not science.” She explains that science tells us nothing about universes that we cannot observe.
The Doctor. Kinjalk Lochan, an assistant professor of physics at IISER Mohali, who specializes in the areas of general relativity, black holes and the early universe, also studies the subject.
Most physicists say that the multiverse concept is speculation or science fiction. So why do some believe it might exist?
Let me infuse some optimism for the sake of discussion, without committing myself to being a champion of the concept. With the advent of quantum mechanics came a wonderful insight – that it is unimaginably difficult to dismiss something completely. Each process has some probability of occurring – low or high – but rarely zero.
Everything we generally see, learn and understand is based on the experiences we have – experiences acquired at the scale (of size and energy) in which we normally live. There is usually a well-understood flow of events from which we draw some logical inferences. For example, if a person is in front of me, I will infer that he is nowhere else at that moment.
At the microscopic level, however, two or more realities can coexist – an electron, for example, can live simultaneously “here” and “there” (proven by experiments). The famous example of Schrodinger's cat shows that the cat can be both dead and alive if it is coupled with a microscopic particle whose being "here" or "there" kills the cat or spares it.
These concepts lead to the idea that when the universe was born, it too was a microscopic entity. So there must also have been a million possibilities for it to coexist. The question is what happened to these other possibilities? Did they disappear in favor of the one we see, or did they all really co-exist? I dare say we don't know for sure.
