The Multiverse

The Multiverse

Introduction

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has turned Cosmology upside down. It looks like all the textbooks may need to be rewritten! (Michio Kaku) The JWST was created to look back as far as possible into the early universe.  It turns out that this original goal of the JWST has been met. It can detect how the universe appeared 290 million years after the Big Bang, which may be its limit as to how far back in time it can go. This is one of man’s incredible accomplishments. You can think of JWST as a time machine. It is felt that our universe is 13.787 billion years old. The prevailing theory about this early universe was that it should be a void. It was thought that it would take 300-400 million years for the first stars to appear after the Big Bang. The expectation was that this early universe should not contain many structures. This time has been referred to as the Dark Ages. Unfortunately, that is not what JWST found (for the Big Bang theory of the origin of stars and galaxies to be completely validated). There were numerous stars and several galaxies present. Indeed, one galaxy was found that is ten times larger than the Milky Way! This galaxy was fully formed 500 million years after the Big Bang. In other words, it is approximately 13.287 billion years old. It usually takes several billion years for galaxies to mature and fully develop (such as our Milky Way). We now have a conundrum. It looks like we may well need to come up with new theories regarding star and galaxy formation. There are some cosmologists who feel that these very surprising findings suggest that we must question the age of our universe as well. Indeed, it appears that one answer to the conundrum may be that we have possibly found indirect evidence of the multiverse. I am a believer, as is Roger Penrose (Nobel Laureate).

Chapter One

The 15 Epochs of Our Universe

There is a common misconception that the Big Bang was an explosion. It was not. Think of it rather as a coiled-up spring suddenly released. The inflationary cosmology theory, as a possible explanation for the Big Bang, was first proposed