Number of Universes in the Multiverse Calculated

Over recent years, a growing number of astronomers has come to believe that the Big Bang did not create just a single Universe, as in the one we inhabit, but many different ones, which only appear locally uniform. The Multiverse theory is catching wings fast, and physicists have recently taken another step for bringing it into the mainstream, when they have calculated the number of individual Universes that must have been created after the original explosion, Technology Review reports.

Stanford University in California physicists Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin decided to take on a task that seemed impossible to complete, namely to determine the variety of instances of the Universes that had been formed after the Big Bang. The number they found was qualified as “humongous.” The two physicists say that some 10^10^10^7 Universes were created when the elementary particles that created our Universe collided.

According to the team, the Big Bang was nothing more than a quantum process that triggered quantum fluctuations in the states of the early Universe. Immediately after the collision, the Universe underwent a period of very fast growth, known as inflation. The perturbations that were formed inside it remained “frozen” as inflation occurred, thus creating regions of different initial classical conditions throughout it. Each one of these regions would therefore have a different set of low-energy physics (natural laws), which arguably construes them as separate Universes.

Vanchurin and Linde say that the number of such separate entities must be directly proportional to the quantum effect that caused the initial fluctuations, known as the slow roll inflation. They admit, however, that the number widely varies according to each person's definition of what a separate Universe means – as in the properties that separate one such structure from the next. The tricky question the team posed was how many of these Universes could we actually see.

They argue that the way the observer is constructed starts playing a very important part in determining this number, from a certain level of complexity onwards. The Berkenstein Limit – a number that limits the amount of information that can be contained within any given volume of space – and the nature and limits of the human brain play a significant part in determining how many of these structures we can make out. One individual is estimated to be able to absorb as much as 10^16 bits of information in a lifetime, which results in the typical human brain having about 10^10^16 configurations.

“We have found that the strongest limit on the number of different locally distinguishable geometries is determined mostly by our abilities to distinguish between different universes and to remember our results,” the experts conclude.