Universes are nested, a bit like Russian dolls or coffee tables — at least, that’s what I took from a new cosmological theory presented this week. According to a team of physicists from the University of Portsmouth, the edge of the observable universe might be the event horizon of a black hole, belonging to a different, upper-level universe. In other words, “our” universe — for now suddenly we have to use the possessive, to ward off potential confusion — is enclosed by another. It’s even possible that our cosmic backyard might itself be the host for various universes, lurking within the black holes scattered about the place like children’s marbles down the side of a couch; little bounded nutshells, occupied by unknown kings of infinite space.
Such disorientating ideas were casually passed on by the Portsmouth team in pursuit of a bigger headline. According to their theory, the world kicked off not with a bang, but with a “crunch” then a “bounce”. The idea that 13.8 billion years ago there was a singularity followed by a period of cosmic inflation is fake news, apparently. Instead a black hole collapsed a bit — our very own dear black hole, the beautiful home of all our possibilities, as I now fondly think of it — before rebounding outwards again, producing all the familiar furniture of the universe but more elegantly explained.
This new theory is said to solve various puzzles, such as why early galaxies rotate both clockwise and anti-clockwise in non-random distributions. This is because our universe was “born spinning” too. And of course, it proposes an answer (of sorts) to an age-old problem: how the cosmic egg could have been laid without a discernible cosmic chicken. “We are not witnessing the birth of everything from nothing, but rather the continuation of a cosmic cycle,” said team leader Professor Enrique Gaztañaga, neatly seeing off one metaphysical enigma while ushering in several others.
I have no idea about the technical details, but I certainly like this lore more than the old kind. Visions of a singleton universe, girth constantly expanding but with nothingness on the other side of the rim, seemed lonely and dysregulated. Now we can think of ourselves as comfortingly protected, with all our emotional and geological chaos contained; hugged, even, by the mother universe that surrounds us. (The Portsmouth team refer only to a “parent universe”, presumably trying to stay on the right side of Stonewall.) And as with the birth of a sibling, it takes the performance pressure off a bit.
“Now we can think of ourselves as comfortingly protected, with all our emotional and geological chaos contained.”
But equally, there is a sense in which none of this can be true: there was no bounce, there was no crunch, there is no enfolding embrace of the mother. Talking about a “Big Bang” was also always nonsense, even when the theory was being treated as certain. For these are metaphors, trying to paste recognisable flesh onto austere mathematical skeletons, and bearing scant literal relation to whatever it was that really occurred.
As literal-minded British astronomer George McVittie complained in 1961: “General relativity predicts no nuclear explosion, big bang, or instantaneous creation, for that matter, as the cause of the start of the expansion at that moment.” Indeed, so irritated were some by its “misleading, trivialising, and inappropriately bellicose” name that in 1993 a magazine ran a competition to rename the Big Bang. There were 13,099 entries from 41 countries — including such suggestions as “Cosmogenesis”, “The Grand Expansion”, and “Hubble Bubble” — before the judging panel decided that none of them were any better than the original. Describing perceptually unknowable reality in natural language is more challenging than you might think.
American physicist Richard Feynman once said he found it easier to imagine angels pushing planets around with their wings than to visualise the electromagnetic field. And when it comes to cosmology, it is not just the fact we lack direct sensory information and could not possibly obtain any. Our ordinary concepts have been honed over millennia to help us negotiate life within a tiny patch of the universe. When we try to apply those concepts to the universe itself as if it was a bag of rice on a shelf, we come unstuck. I know how to count, but not to infinity; I know where my phone is, but not where space is; I can think about the past, present and future, but not about what was the case “before” time began. As philosopher N.R. Hanson wrote, the problems arise “because of cosmology’s concern for totalities”; you cannot treat everything as if it was a something.
Given that we can’t describe cosmological events literally except by reciting equations, it might appear that any old metaphor would have done instead. Could we perhaps revert to the creation myths about a diver dragging a speck of mud up from the ocean floor, or a raven separating light from dark with its wings? Were the Eighties feminist philosophers right when they argued that science’s preferred metaphors betray only phallocentric prejudices and the “logic of domination”: nature as a female body to be penetrated for her secrets, or the beginning of the universe as spectacular ejaculation? But despite the semantic indirectness, a good metaphor still shows something instructive. It’s a filter placed over an object, helping us to zoom in and pick out interesting new features, then zoom out again to find our understanding of the whole thing fruitfully reorganised. Or as philosopher Nelson Goodman once observed, to the probable horror of said feminists: “A metaphor is an affair between a predicate with a past and an object that yields while protesting.”
Equally, though, the intoxicating gleam of an image can carry sober-minded truth-seekers away. The idea of symmetrical worlds-within-worlds has always been especially tempting. The ancients loved to find structural affinities between the “macrocosm” and the “microcosm” of the human body: a fact I was reminded of just this week, as I read of celebrities removing tiny spiralling galaxies of microplastic particles from their veins. Commenting in 1923, Max Born apparently enthused that “a remarkable and alluring result of Bohr’s atomic theory is the demonstration that the atom is a small planetary system”. But Werner Heisenberg was more sceptical: “quantum mechanics has above all to free itself from these intuitive pictures… that in principle [are] not testable and thereby could lead to internal contradictions.”
Ultimately, even the most imaginative physicist is somewhat hampered by a duty to be faithful to reality. For the really good stuff, you need to go straight to the masters of fictional worlds-within-worlds: Borges, Mary Norton and her Borrowers, whoever it was that wrote “The Numskulls” in The Beano. In one of Borges’ stories, the narrator descends into the cellar of a house to find an “Aleph” — “a point in space that contains all other points”. In a single paragraph, describing everything to be simultaneously seen in the Aleph, Borges compresses overheated meaning into a little box on the page then lets it rapidly expand to cover everything there has ever been or will be. The paragraph ends:
“I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe… I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe.”
Now, that’s how you describe a totality.
Whatever the truth of our deep origins, be they banging or bouncing, it is safe to say there is absolutely nothing humans can do about it. The causality only flows in one direction, which frankly comes as something of a relief: one less thing for the to-do list. We have about as much power to control cosmological events as the microplastics spinning around in Orlando Bloom’s blood. Still, if the Portsmouth team is right, there are some consolations. We are not alone, but in a family of universes; all of us together in this existence thing. And though ours may be a gleam in some other universe’s eye, it also contains marvellous multitudes.
