The Pulse of the Universe (Second Part)

"... our own universe does not seem to be approaching a Minkowski vacuum. Rather, it appears to be accelerating again, and collisions with other bubbles may forever remain hidden behind the cosmological horizon. ... This means that we are very unlikely to be hit by a bubble at any time in the future."

Jaume Garriga, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin, have recently published an idea that leads to the above statements.

They go on to state:
"Dipole anisotropies and memory of initial conditions are not commodities one usually expects from inflation. Although we find this result to be rather shocking, the effect is real."

Before I go on to explain what I think Garriga et al. are saying, I want to give a little background information on the whole issue of the meaning of time.

Time is both an a-priori condition to knowledge, as Kant wrote more than two hundred years ago, and a a member in its full right of the Real World Out There (RWOT). Our time depends on the time of the Universe. There is no way we can keep a beat, if the whole bubble universe we inhabit, does not have a beat also.

Alan Guth invented inflation, and in the work I am using here, he finds that if there is inflation, then there should be some memory of this inflation. They call that: "Persistence of Memory". In their view we are inside one of many bubbles. These bubbles collide with each other, and then they have to answer the question of what is the probability that we will be hit by other bubbles. Inside their model, it is possible to live for a long time without any collisions with the "outside world", and besides, that our bubble "remembers" how it all started in our region of the multiverse. There is hope that we will measure this cosmic event, i.e. that our bubble remembers where was the explosion that led to the inflationary phase we are experiencing. This record is essential for my idea of time to acquire meaning. Without our bubble remembering how it all began, we could not have a sense of time.

Guth and friends find out that it is possible to have a bubble with a preferred origin and with a very small possibility of other bubbles bumping us out of existence. These are good news.

The article is in Los Alamos.