As far as I know there’s zero empirical evidence of a multi-verse and many physicists consider such an idea non-falsifiable.
You are Isaac Asimov and I claim my five pounds.
That’s close enough!
Well, we definitely need some new terminology here… By “our cosmos” I mean the bounded (or perhaps unbounded?) space-time that is causally derived from the Big Bang (including zones inaccessible to us now because of inflation.) I mean regions where “time,” as we know it, exists.
Those other regions, from which our cosmos might have been pinched (“'oo 'alf-inched me cosmos, then?”) are part of a greater…thing. Multiverse maybe. But out in that greater region, “time” doesn’t mean the same. You can’t ask, “What was happening out there at five o’clock on Wednesday?” They don’t have five o’clocks or Wednesdays there.
(They might very well have their own distinct time-like dimension, but it isn’t ours, any more than their space-like dimensions are ours.)
Whether there are meta-dimensions – an overarching framework in which all the little, lesser bubble-universes are embedded – I don’t see any way for us ever to know.
(There are some very speculative ideas that we might be able to detect evidence of nearby other bubbles, by physical effects that “leak” through the barriers between. A neighboring bubble’s gravity, for instance, might pull swarms of our galaxies off in some particular direction. The existence of other universes isn’t necessarily philosophical nonsense.)
The question, whose implications may fluster, draws inspiration from the objection a creationist has been confronted with at times: “If God created the universe, then who created God?”
Certain believers have come up with the following false dilemma: "Since something must have always existed, either (1) time, space and matter have always existed, or (2) the eternal & spiritual God has always existed (outside the material universe). Since the prevailing cosmological model describes the birth of the universe as the expansion of a singularity, the conclusion appears to be obvious (sic!).
Eventually everyone sees what they expect to see.
These arguments aren’t really relevant to God, or at least, not relevant to God as usually described by theologians. The Universe is a temporal thing, and hence can have an origin, but God is not temporal, but eternal, and thus it is meaningless to speak of God’s origin.
A God is impossible within our universe. But other universes (bubbles in the foam) may have different dimensions than ours, and different laws and axioms. Rather that 3 spatial + 1 temporal, another universe may have 1 spatial, 4 temporal, and a few others. A God that is impossible in our bubble, may be very possible within a different bubble; in fact, there may be an infinite number of Gods within a universe with only 1 spatial dimension.
No, Budget nailed it: the OP question is malformed. It makes the fallacious assumption that time exists independent of the universe, and then asks about the universe in the context of time. To point out that the question makes no sense is just like being asked “can an irresistible force move an immovable object?” and pointing out that that makes no sense, either.
Why would other universes be expected to contain matter, and their matter to exhibit the property of gravity? And if they do, what makes them “other” and not a part of this one?
My favorite multiverse theory is still Everett’s “many worlds” which posits that every quantum collapse results in all possible outcomes, each in its own universe. David Deutsch believes that quantum computers will eventually be concrete evidence that not only is Everett’s multiverse real, but that they interact with it by virtue of the fact that they are capable of producing computational results that are hundreds of orders of magnitude greater than the visible computational resources. Where, he asks, is the rest of it? In effect, Deutsch believes, a quantum computer is so powerful because it outsources almost all of its work to its qubit counterparts in all the other universes. But there’s no interaction at the macroscopic level where superposition has collapsed, so we think we live in a boring single universe.
Like some sort of cosmological loaf?
The multiverse was just part of a bigger multi-multiverse. And that was just part of a bigger multi[sup]3[/sup]-verse, . . .
It’s multiverses all the way up.
The “other” question is nothing more than linguistic. I call it “other” because it is outside of our “big bang” spacetime; it is some other spacetime entirely. And there is no reason to expect anything. I noted that some physicists have speculated that it might be possible that other bubble cosmoses might have something like matter that generates something like gravity, which might leak through from one bubble cosmos to another. Pure speculation, and not an “expectation” in any form.
I love this! I hadn’t heard of Deutsch or his ideas, but I adore them. Emotionally, I want them to be true!
Alas, in wet-blanket mode, I will predict that quantum computing will produce only minor advances in such things as number theory, but will never perform to the level you/Deutsch describe. It would be wonderful if it does, and I would be delighted to be wrong here.
(And even limited breakthroughs will be wonderful! We can be happy with any progress at all. Quantum spin seemed perfectly abstract at first…and now we use it to make our hard disks read and write faster! Yay!)
Yes, time, space, and matter had a beginning at the Big Bang. What caused the Big Bang? Before the Big Bang, was there still something?
We have no way of knowing. The laws of physics and causality and so on were created at the Big Bang. There was no time before the Big Bang, so how could there have been cause and effect? If you complain that cause and effect and the laws of physics and logic must have applied before the Big Bang, how do you know? We know that the laws of physics and logic apply in the Universe, because we live here. 2+2=4. But before the Big Bang, for all we know, 2+2=Purple.
And to speak of “before the Big Bang” is to talk of things that don’t make sense. It’s like asking “what’s north of the north pole?” There is no north of the north pole, it’s the 11 of north. Time began at the Big Bang, so there was no “before”, space and matter began at the Big Bang so there was no something. There wasn’t even a nothing, as far as we can tell.
A perfectly reasonably answer, in my opinion.
Humans are as practical as any other living things and this is exactly the reason why they come up with stories and believe in them. Because there is a visceral need in every person that s/he should know where we come from, why we’re here, how we should live, what the universe is and how it all began. For every one such question, there are one thousand myths you can refer to. The human mind craves to make sense of everything and wants all the explanations now.
Not only does narrative knowlege seem easier to be assimilated (because it operates with symbols that each community member can relate to) but it is also ready to fill every possible hole or crack in your knowldge edifice with yet another story. Nature does not really abhor a vaccum - myths do.
In order to assimilate scientific knowledge, one has to make great effort, to learn symbols and languages that have little/no use in day-to-day life, and to accept the fact that the end of the journey many of the questions one has to ask will remain without an answer. From both the individual’s and the community’s perspectives, it may seem more efficient and practical to resort to myth.
The brain has been compared with a computer, and language with the software running the applications that make up the flow of consciousness. It is an inadequate comparison in my opinion, like using a light bulb’s explosion to understand supernovas, but I think (if we accept the computer analogy) it is worth noting that in order to function properly the “mind processor” requires a complete set of input information, and the truth value of this information has a different definition from the ones used in formal logic or science.
In this respect, a perfectly reasonably answer will often be perceived as unsatisfactory, fundamentally incoherent, anti-intellectual even.
I think Sagan differentiated between the Universe, which was our livable accessible bubble from the Big Bang, and the Cosmos, which included any potential exterior to our Universe, alternate Universes, multiverses, etc.
Then where are branes, and how do they interact, and the branes that collided that caused the Big Bang, what was happening to them before?
Most of us imagine that space is a different space in each universe (if there is more than one), and that the question “What is beyond space?” is absurd. Why not treat time the same way?
The idea that the “Supreme Creator”, whatever you conceive Him to be, created not only Heaven, Earth and Space, but also Time is not new:
[QUOTE=St. Augustine of Hippo (translated by Edward Bouverie Pusey)]
Seeing then Thou art the Creator of all times, if any time was before Thou madest heaven and earth, why say they that Thou didst forego working? For that very time didst Thou make, nor could times pass by, before Thou madest those times. But if before heaven and earth there was no time, why is it demanded, what Thou then didst? For there was no “then,” when there was no time.
[/QUOTE]