The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos

by Brian Greene

  ALSO BY BRIAN GREENE

  Icarus at the Edge of Time

  The Fabric of the Cosmos

  The Elegant Universe

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2011 Brian Greene

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Greene, B. (Brian), [date]

  The hidden reality parallel universes and the deep laws of the cosmos /

  by Brian Greene.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59525-6

  1. Physics—Philosophy. 2. Quantum theory.

  3. General relativity (Physics) 4. Cosmology. I. Title.

  QC6.G6885 2011

  530.12—dc22 2010042710

  Jacket design by Peter Mendelsund

  v3.1_r1

  To Alec and Sophia

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  1. The Bounds of Reality

  On Parallel Worlds

  2. Endless Doppelgängers

  The Quilted Multiverse

  3. Eternity and Infinity

  The Inflationary Multiverse

  4. Unifying Nature’s Laws

  On the Road to String Theory

  5. Hovering Universes in Nearby Dimensions

  The Brane and Cyclic Multiverses

  6. New Thinking About an Old Constant

  The Landscape Multiverse

  7. Science and the Multiverse

  On Inference, Explanation, and Prediction

  8. The Many Worlds of Quantum Measurement

  The Quantum Multiverse

  9. Black Holes and Holograms

  The Holographic Multiverse

  10. Universes, Computers, and Mathematical Reality

  The Simulated and Ultimate Multiverses

  11. The Limits of Inquiry

  Multiverses and the Future

  Notes

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  About the Author

  Preface

  If there was any doubt at the turn of the twentieth century, by the turn of the twenty-first, it was a foregone conclusion: when it comes to revealing the true nature of reality, common experience is deceptive. On reflection, that’s not particularly surprising. As our forebears gathered in forests and hunted on the savannas, an ability to calculate the quantum behavior of electrons or determine the cosmological implications of black holes would have provided little in the way of survival advantage. But an edge was surely offered by having a larger brain, and as our intellectual faculties grew, so, too, did our capacity to probe our surroundings more deeply. Some of our species built equipment to extend the reach of our senses; others became facile with a systematic method for detecting and expressing pattern—mathematics. With these tools, we began to peer behind everyday appearances.

  What we’ve found has already required sweeping changes to our picture of the cosmos. Through physical insight and mathematical rigor, guided and confirmed by experimentation and observation, we’ve established that space, time, matter, and energy engage a behavioral repertoire unlike anything any of us have ever directly witnessed. And now, penetrating analyses of these and related discoveries are leading us to what may be the next upheaval in understanding: the possibility that our universe is not the only universe. The Hidden Reality explores this possibility.

  In writing The Hidden Reality, I’ve presumed no expertise in physics or mathematics on the part of the reader. Instead, as in my previous books, I’ve used metaphor and analogy, interspersed with historical episodes, to give a broadly accessible account of some of the strangest and, should they prove correct, most revealing insights of modern physics. Many of the concepts covered require the reader to abandon comfortable modes of thought and to embrace unanticipated realms of reality. It’s a journey that’s all the more exciting, and understandable, for the scientific twists and turns that have blazed the trail. I’ve judiciously chosen from these to fill out a landscape of ideas that peak by valley stretches from the everyday to the wholly unfamiliar.

  A difference in approach from my previous books is that I’ve not included preliminary chapters that systematically develop background material, such as special and general relativity and quantum mechanics. Instead, for the most part, I introduce elements from those subjects only on an “as needed” basis; when I find in various places that a somewhat fuller development is necessary to keep the book self-contained, I warn the more experienced reader and indicate which sections he or she may safely skip.

  By contrast, the last pages of various chapters segue to a more in-depth treatment of the material, which some readers may find challenging. As we enter those sections, I offer the less experienced reader a brief summary and the option to jump ahead without loss of continuity. Nevertheless, I’d encourage everyone to read as far into these sections as interest and patience allow. While the descriptions are more involved, the material is written for a broad audience and so continues to have as its only prerequisite the will to persevere.

  In this regard, the notes are different. The novice reader can skip them entirely; the more experienced reader will find in the notes clarifications or extensions that I consider important but deem too burdensome for inclusion in the chapters themselves. Many of the notes are meant for readers with some formal training in mathematics or physics.

  While writing The Hidden Reality, I’ve benefited from critical comments and feedback offered by a number of friends, colleagues, and family members who read some or all of the book’s chapters. I’d like to especially thank David Albert, Tracy Day, Richard Easther, Rita Greene, Simon Judes, Daniel Kabat, David Kagan, Paul Kaiser, Raphael Kasper, Juan Maldacena, Katinka Matson, Maulik Parikh, Marcus Poessel, Michael Popowits, and Ken Vineberg. It is always a joy to work with my editor at Knopf, Marty Asher, and I thank Andrew Carlson for his expert shepherding of the book through the final stages of production. Jason Severs’s wonderful illustrations greatly enhance the presentation, and I thank him for both his talent and his patience. It is also a pleasure to offer thanks to my literary agents, Katinka Matson and John Brockman.

  In developing my approach to the material I cover in this book, I’ve benefited from a great many conversations with numerous colleagues. In addition to those already mentioned, I’d like to especially thank Raphael Bousso, Robert Brandenberger, Frederik Denef, Jacques Distler, Michael Douglas, Lam Hui, Lawrence Krauss, Janna Levin, Andrei Linde, Seth Lloyd, Barry Loewer, Saul Perlmutter, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Steve Shenker, Paul Steinhardt, Andrew Strominger, Leonard Susskind, Max Tegmark, Henry Tye, Curmrun Vafa, David Wallace, Erick Weinberg, and Shing-Tung Yau.

  I started writing my first general-level science book, The Elegant Universe, in the summer of 1996. In the fifteen years since, I’ve enjoyed an unexpected and fruitful interplay between the focus of my technical research and the topics that my books cover. I thank my students and colleagues at Columbia University for creating a vibrant research environment, the Department of Energy for funding my scientific research, and also the late Pentti Kouri for his generous support of my research center at Columbia, the Institute for S
trings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics.

  Finally, I thank Tracy, Alec, and Sophia for making this the best of all possible universes.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Bounds of Reality

  On Parallel Worlds

  If, when I was growing up, my room had been adorned with only a single mirror, my childhood daydreams might have been very different. But it had two. And each morning when I opened the closet to get my clothes, the one built into its door aligned with the one on the wall, creating a seemingly endless series of reflections of anything situated between them. It was mesmerizing. I delighted in seeing image after image populating the parallel glass planes, extending back as far as the eye could discern. All the reflections seemed to move in unison—but that, I knew, was a mere limitation of human perception; at a young age I had learned of light’s finite speed. So in my mind’s eye, I would watch the light’s round-trip journeys. The bob of my head, the sweep of my arm silently echoed between the mirrors, each reflected image nudging the next. Sometimes I would imagine an irreverent me way down the line who refused to fall into place, disrupting the steady progression and creating a new reality that informed the ones that followed. During lulls at school, I would sometimes think about the light I had shed that morning, still endlessly bouncing between the mirrors, and I’d join one of my reflected selves, entering an imaginary parallel world constructed of light and driven by fantasy.

  To be sure, reflected images don’t have minds of their own. But these youthful flights of fancy, with their imagined parallel realities, resonate with an increasingly prominent theme in modern science—the possibility of worlds lying beyond the one we know. This book is an exploration of such possibilities, a considered journey through the science of parallel universes.

  Universe and Universes

  There was a time when “universe” meant “all there is.” Everything. The whole shebang. The notion of more than one universe, more than one everything, would seemingly be a contradiction in terms. Yet a range of theoretical developments has gradually qualified the interpretation of “universe.” The word’s meaning now depends on context. Sometimes “universe” still connotes absolutely everything. Sometimes it refers only to those parts of everything that someone such as you or I could, in principle, have access to. Sometimes it’s applied to separate realms, ones that are partly or fully, temporarily or permanently, inaccessible to us; in this sense, the word relegates our universe to membership in a large, perhaps infinitely large, collection.

  With its hegemony diminished, “universe” has given way to other terms that capture the wider canvas on which the totality of reality may be painted. Parallel worlds or parallel universes or multiple universes or alternate universes or the metaverse, megaverse, or multiverse—they’re all synonymous and they’re all among the words used to embrace not just our universe but a spectrum of others that may be out there.

  You’ll notice that the terms are somewhat vague. What exactly constitutes a world or a universe? What criteria distinguish realms that are distinct parts of a single universe from those classified as universes of their own? Perhaps someday our understanding of multiple universes will mature sufficiently for us to have precise answers to these questions. For now, we’ll avoid wrestling with abstract definitions by adopting the approach famously applied by Justice Potter Stewart to define pornography. While the U.S. Supreme Court struggled to delineate a standard, Stewart declared, “I know it when I see it.”

  In the end, labeling one realm or another a parallel universe is merely a question of language. What matters, what’s at the heart of the subject, is whether there exist realms that challenge convention by suggesting that what we’ve long thought to be the universe is only one component of a far grander, perhaps far stranger, and mostly hidden, reality.

  Varieties of Parallel Universes

  A striking fact (it’s in part what propelled me to write this book) is that many of the major developments in fundamental theoretical physics—relativistic physics, quantum physics, cosmological physics, unified physics, computational physics—have led us to consider one or another variety of parallel universe. Indeed, the chapters that follow trace a narrative arc through nine variations on the multiverse theme. Each envisions our universe as part of an unexpectedly larger whole, but the complexion of that whole and the nature of the member universes differ sharply among them. In some, the parallel universes are separated from us by enormous stretches of space or time; in others, they’re hovering millimeters away; in others still, the very notion of their location proves parochial, devoid of meaning. A similar range of possibility is manifest in the laws governing the parallel universes. In some, the laws are the same as in ours; in others, they appear different but have a shared heritage; in others still, the laws are of a form and structure unlike anything we’ve ever encountered. It’s at once humbling and stirring to imagine just how expansive reality may be.

  Some of the earliest scientific forays into parallel worlds were initiated in the 1950s by researchers puzzling over aspects of quantum mechanics, a theory developed to explain phenomena taking place in the microscopic realm of atoms and subatomic particles. Quantum mechanics broke the mold of the previous framework, classical mechanics, by establishing that the predictions of science are necessarily probabilistic. We can predict the odds of attaining one outcome, we can predict the odds of another, but we generally can’t predict which will actually happen. This well-known departure from hundreds of years of scientific thought is surprising enough. But there’s a more confounding aspect of quantum theory that receives less attention. After decades of closely studying quantum mechanics, and after having accumulated a wealth of data confirming its probabilistic predictions, no one has been able to explain why only one of the many possible outcomes in any given situation actually happens. When we do experiments, when we examine the world, we all agree that we encounter a single definite reality. Yet, more than a century after the quantum revolution began, there is no consensus among the world’s physicists as to how this basic fact is compatible with the theory’s mathematical expression.

  Over the years, this substantial gap in understanding has inspired many creative proposals, but the most startling was among the first. Maybe, that early suggestion went, the familiar notion that any given experiment has one and only one outcome is flawed. The mathematics underlying quantum mechanics—or at least, one perspective on the math—suggests that all possible outcomes happen, each inhabiting its own separate universe. If a quantum calculation predicts that a particle might be here, or it might be there, then in one universe it is here, and in another it is there. And in each such universe, there’s a copy of you witnessing one or the other outcome, thinking—incorrectly—that your reality is the only reality. When you realize that quantum mechanics underlies all physical processes, from the fusing of atoms in the sun to the neural firings that constitutes the stuff of thought, the far-reaching implications of the proposal become apparent. It says that there’s no such thing as a road untraveled. Yet each such road—each reality—is hidden from all others.

  This tantalizing Many Worlds approach to quantum mechanics has attracted much interest in recent decades. But investigations have shown that it’s a subtle and thorny framework (as we will discuss in Chapter 8); so, even today, after more than half a century of vetting, the proposal remains controversial. Some quantum practitioners argue that it has already been proved correct, while others claim just as assuredly that the mathematical underpinnings don’t hold together.

  Such scientific uncertainty notwithstanding, this early version of parallel universes resonated with themes of separate lands or alternative histories that were being explored in literature, television, and film, creative forays that continue today. (My favorites since childhood include The Wizard of Oz, It’s a Wonderful Life, the Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” the Borges story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” and, more recently, Sliding Doors and Run Lola Run.) Collec
tively, these and many other works of popular culture have helped integrate the concept of parallel realities into the zeitgeist and are responsible for fueling much public fascination with the topic. But quantum mechanics is only one of numerous ways that a conception of parallel universes emerges from modern physics. In fact, it won’t be the first I’ll discuss.

  In Chapter 2, I’ll begin with a different route to parallel universes, perhaps the simplest route of all. We’ll see that if space extends infinitely far—a proposition that is consistent with all observations and that is part of the cosmological model favored by many physicists and astronomers—then there must be realms out there (likely way out there) where copies of you and me and everything else are enjoying alternate versions of the reality we experience here. Chapter 3 will journey deeper into cosmology: the inflationary theory, an approach that posits an enormous burst of superfast spatial expansion during the universe’s earliest moments, generates its own version of parallel worlds. If inflation is correct, as the most refined astronomical observations suggest, the burst that created our region of space may not have been unique. Instead, right now, inflationary expansion in distant realms may be spawning universe upon universe and may continue to do so for all eternity. What’s more, each of these ballooning universes has its own infinite spatial expanse, and hence contains infinitely many of the parallel worlds encountered in Chapter 2.

  In Chapter 4, our trek turns to string theory. After a brief review of the basics, I’ll provide a status report on this approach to unifying all of nature’s laws. With that overview, in Chapters 5 and 6 we’ll explore recent developments in string theory that suggest three new kinds of parallel universes. One is string theory’s braneworld scenario, which posits that our universe is one of potentially numerous “slabs” floating in a higher-dimensional space, much like a slice of bread within a grander cosmic loaf.1 If we’re lucky, it’s an approach that may provide an observable signature at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, in the not too distant future. A second variety emerges from braneworlds that slam into one another, wiping away all they contain and initiating a new, fiery big bang–like beginning in each. As if two giant hands were clapping, this could happen over and over—branes might collide, bounce apart, attract each other gravitationally, and then collide again, a cyclic process generating universes that are parallel not in space but in time. The third scenario is the string theory “landscape,” founded on the enormous number of possible shapes and sizes for the theory’s required extra spatial dimensions. We’ll see that, when joined with the Inflationary Multiverse, the string landscape suggests a vast collection of universes in which every possible form for the extra dimensions is realized.