Weiye Loh's Library tagged Universe →  View Popular, Search in Google

We can’t actually see light that was emitted in the first 300,000 years or so after the Big Bang, because the universe was too crammed full of primordial material for that light to go anywhere.

 

And the universe didn’t begin at a single point. It began in a place of infinite size, and everything in this limitless space went ‘bang’ at the same moment (we think) and it was the space between these evolving particles of the physically observable universe which began to expand, letting the light shine through, and as Schmidt et al have found, continuing to expand at an accelerating rate under the influence of what is in science short hand, called ‘dark energy’.

 

Which means that when we see the light from something that happened more than 13 billion years ago, anything sentient looking towards us from the reverse direction sees the same ancient light emitted throughout an endless universe that was dark (we think) and went bang (we think) at exactly the same moment (we think.)

The frustrations of serious cosmologists with popular science short hand lead to Professor Schmidt’s old alma mater, Harvard University, posting its superbly elegant  Brief Answers to Cosmic Questions page on the web, which among other things deals with ‘Does the Universe have an Edge?’ (No) and ‘Did it expand from a single point?’ (No) .

In a first attempt to find observational evidence of the multivers, the team from London and Canada is using a computer algorithm to survey the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation left over from the Big Bang in search of disk-like patterns where our bubble may have collided with other bubbles. The CMB data from NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) hasn’t given them enough information to either confirm or rule out any collisions, but new data (available to the public in 2013) from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite will help them further their search.

Greene said in his interview with NPR that another source of observational evidence of the multiverse could be the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. String theory predicts that each universe is on its own “membrane,” and according to Greene, we can think of the multiverse as a cosmic loaf of bread where each slice is a separate universe. When scientists at the LHC smash protons into each other at unbelievable speeds, he said, it’s possible that remnants of the collisions could spin off of our slice of bread, leaving less energy after the collision than before it, which would otherwise be impossible according to the law of conservation of energy.