Imagine we are looking into an empty aquarium filled with a clear liquid and with an unpleasant looking layer of slime on the bottom. From time to time a tiny bubble emerges from the slime, rises slowly, expanding as it goes, eventually pops and is never seen again. Other bubbles follow, each rising and achieving a certain size, but all eventually popping. At any one time we have a lot of bubbles of different ages and sizes but all doomed to pop eventually. However there is a constant source of new bubbles, and so we have a never ending but continuously changing population of bubbles. We have no idea of how or why they are being generated, what is happening inside of them, why they pop and what then happens to them. Apart from observing an unending series of bubble births, short lives and sudden deaths through the glass wall of the aquarium we have no way of finding out, as they are on the inside and we are forever on the outside. We can think of each bubble as being a universe, one of which is our own. Thus we can see that there could be an infinite number of universes, each in a different state of development, some not even born yet and some already dead. To make things more interesting we can conceive of our aquarium as being just a bubble within a greater aquarium, and hence being just one universe within a collection of universes. And so on ad infinitum. However to keep things simple we will consider our universe as just one universe within a single infinity of universes. That is, we are one bubble within an aquarium that exists within a non-existent void.

 As a bubble is a bit too small and short lived for our detailed examination, we shall change our analogy to something more convenient. Imagine now our universe starting out as a tiny balloon containing an even tinier amount of some unstable noxious matter that suddenly goes bang. Our balloon expands almost instantaneously but not quite to bursting point. After the bang a complex mix of chemicals is left behind which continue to react together and to generate as a bye-product a flow of gas. This causes the balloon to expand further, but at a much slower and steadier rate. Within the balloon the chemical turmoil continues and life forms start to emerge, leading eventually to clever old homo sapiens, or us for short. Many generations of us are produced, each one far cleverer than the last, and with a fascination for finding out where we came from and where we are going, and why. In the meanwhile our balloon continues to expand, and after a while our part of it starts to get unpleasantly hot and we either frizzle up or find some cooler part and head off there. In either case it doesn't matter in the long run as our balloon cannot go on expanding forever without something giving. It either goes up in a big bang or develops a little leak allowing the gas to gradually escape and our balloon to slowly implode back to a tiny scrap of material. Despite this dismal future, generations of our scientists dedicate their lives to a greater understanding of what is going on within our balloon with its opaque walls where nothing can get either in or out. They apply their observational and experimental skills alongside their intellectual genius to develop a set of rules - the laws of physics - that can explain most but not all of what is happening around us. In particular a small number of constants are identified, things that do not change over space or time such as the speed of light (c) and the value of gravity (g). One of these, c, has particularly caught the public imagination. The laws of physics say that nothing can ever go faster than this. An implication is that when we look at distant stars, because the light has had to travel for a very long time, we are seeing things as they were many years, possibly millions of years ago. We are indeed seeing the past through our own eyes. However if we want to visit such a star, we not only have to have the technology which will transport us at something approaching c but we will have to travel for an even longer time in the future than we have been able to see in the past. We cannot know for certain what is there when we start our journey let alone what will be there when we arrive. Further more the laws of physics tell us that there are some places travelling so fast away from us that we will never be able to see them, let alone visit them. Of course science fiction has been able to get round this for a long time, and can also readily visit both past and future. Science fact as always is trying desperately to catch up with fiction and has produced some highly convoluted mathematics to go with its black holes that might just do the trick. Watch this Space!

 For most of our thesis we are going to live just within our own balloon and within the more conservative laws of physics. However from time to time we will indulge ourselves in little flights of fantasy. Firstly let’s deal with the speed of light and the other supposed constants of our universe. For long distance travel we really need to be able to faster than c if we are to get there in a reasonable time, or in some cases get there at all. Alternatively we could somehow make our destination nearer. To these ends we need to get back into the multi-universe aquarium as a bubble once again. Our universe drifts around but occasionally bumps into the glass or into another bubble, or is prodded by something, but does not burst. However our surface is distorted for a moment or two, the internal pressure increases near where the bump occurs and a shock wave is generated before everything stabilizes again. During this time although our laws of physics may still hold, the constants are temporarily altered, in particular c. Back in the steady state our constants have reverted to their original values, but things have moved about a bit, especially near where the bump occurred. Thus for a short time we may have been able to go faster than the old speed of light, because c had increased and hence we got nearer to our destination. Also by being bumped about in space our start and end points might have closed up, leaving us even nearer. A problem with this scenario is that these external bumps and prods are neither predictable or under our control, so how can they be used to aid our travel purposes? It could be that relative to our time scales, the reverberations from a bump are quite long, giving us the opportunity and time to exploit when it happens. Or there could be some sort of rhythmic bumping which we could learn to predict and hence utilize.

 Now let's get even more fanciful. Suppose our balloon material (we are back from the bubble again) is not completely solid, but permeable, allowing certain things to get through. Let's look first at things getting in from the outside. Whatever form they take they would to some extent disturb the existing steady state and possibly shift it permanently to some degree. What if our immediately external universe is cleverer than we are? For example it might have injected life forms into us a long while ago, and might even do so again. Similarly if we were cleverer than it and could send things through the other way, we could take control.

 Finally in our fancy, when our bubble (back to the aquarium again) bursts, an assortment of matter is released into the liquid. This happens repeatedly and seemingly infinitely as other bubbles burst, further polluting the host universe with all manner of strange matter. Thus the universe that is our aquarium is itself developing in strange new ways and impacting on the infinity of universes to which ours belongs. Eventually the mix becomes so heady that it explodes, destroying the aquarium and all the future universes that would have been born from it. It is fortunate, therefore that our aquarium is itself only one of an infinite number of such aquaria otherwise we would all have come to a very sticky end. The above are games that anyone can play. It is the poor dear scientists who have to prove or disprove our theories, and we must not test their patience too much. However we are entering a world where the unlikely often becomes the likely and the impossible becomes the certainty.

 We will now concentrate entirely on our own little old universe. We believe with some strong justification that it was created some 16,000,000,000 years ago (or 1.6* 10 ^10 in mathematical shorthand), apparently out of nothing and for no known reason. What or who caused it to happen remains a mystery to scientists, and perhaps can only be addressed by philosophers and theologians. Rather a lot seems to have happened in the first .000,000,000,000,000 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,1 (or 1*10^-37) seconds, but science doesn't seem so sure of the details. From then on it seems pretty confident of the sequence of events and the direction in which the universe is going. Scientists have calculated that it has grown from nothing to an observable size of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (or 1*10^24) miles and is made up of bits and pieces each measuring about .000,000,000,001 (or 1*10^-12) inches.

 This gives us our first problem. These very large and very small numbers have no meaning for us. They are way beyond our comprehension in relationship to our own life spans and what we can see and feel. Add a couple of noughts somewhere or knock off a couple somewhere else and it would all still look the same to us. A scientist however would either go into a delirium of excitement or a fit of suicidal despair, depending on whether it was someone else's theory or his own that had been destroyed. A device we shall use is stolen from the world of cinematography. When something is happening too quickly for us to take in, the film speed is increased when the pictures are taken so that when we look at them at normal speed we have plenty of time to take it all in. We can see the speeding bullet slowly penetrating the cranium of the badhat and the resulting gore splattering gently on to the pristine white wall. Similarly if we slow down the camera we can see the snowdrop push itself out of the frozen earth, quickly develop into full blossom and die, without sitting up for days on end. Roughly what we shall do is assume that each major event in the development of the universe and of ourselves takes about 100 years. This corresponds to a time period that we can identify with, being within our own memory or that of the generation before us. On this basis we slow down the initial creation of the universe (1*10^-37 seconds) by an enormous factor, while speeding up the creation of the solar system by a smaller (but still huge) amount. We shall apply a similar trick to size, increasing the size of the smallest item (1*10^-12 inches) to about an inch, while decreasing the observable universe (1.6*10^10 miles) to the size of our earth. This is akin to using a rather powerful telescope from both ends. We will still go back to the old system when we need to highlight a specific point, such as how short a time man has been on Earth or how many generations of man(or our successors) it will take in travel time to get us somewhere equally congenial

© Vic Forrington 2001