Bumping Bubbles

Via Sarah, news of the first observational evidence of the existence of other universes.  And they didn’t find just one footprint, they found four.

Nothing in physics prevents the possibilities of outside universes, but neither has it helped to constrain them, leaving scientists free to talk of branes and bubbles. Many of these ideas have been considered untestable, but a paper uploaded to arXiv last month considers the effects of two universes colliding and searches for fingerprints of such a collision of our own universe. Surprisingly, the team reports that they may have detected not one, but four collisional imprints.

The team, led by Stephen Feeney at the University College London, considered a collision between bubble universes. They conducted a simulation based on a formulation of Einstein’s field equation, known as de Sitter space. This solution to Einstein’s equations is essentially a description of how space itself behaves. From interactions between such spaces, they determined a set of observable effects visible in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Among them, they required that signals have azimuthal symmetry or are mirrored on both sides of the sky. Secondly, the signals should be circular in shape.

Searching the WMAP archives, the team found numerous possible signals, but eventually narrowed it town to four strong candidates.

Though the article goes on to state that the evidence may proceed from other causes or even been created randomly, this does pose a vast cosmological threat to our existence.  First, all of the wacky alternate history stories are now more plausible.  (In how many of those four universes did Hitler or Jeff Davis win?)  But secondly, if another universe bumps into our anywhere in our vicinity, it causes a period of blazing cosmic inflation that will incinerate us and leave us nothing but debris flying out of a miniature big bang!

Sux, dude.

On the positive side, all the wacky science in Implied Spaces just took a huge jump in the direction of reality.