Parallel worlds have long been of interest to scientists, and there are many different theories in the world that you can believe in or doubt.

People have been thinking about the possibility of the existence of parallel worlds for a long time. The Italian thinker Giordano Bruno, who spoke about other inhabited worlds, even fell victim to the Holy Inquisition - his ideas were so contrary to the then accepted picture of the world. Today is not the Middle Ages, and scientists are not being burned at the stake. But even now, arguments that our reality may not be the only one often cause, if not ridicule, then certainly mistrust. We emphasize that we are not talking about the existence of alien living matter, which many assume, but about the hypothetical presence of an alternative reality around us. If parallel worlds exist, what could they be like and what can humanity expect from them?

There is a point of view that the mystery of alternative existence is associated with a certain “fifth dimension”. Allegedly, in addition to three spatial dimensions and the “fourth dimension” - time, there is one more. By opening it, people will supposedly be able to travel between parallel worlds. However, the head of the sector of interdisciplinary problems of scientific and technological development of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Philosophy Vladimir Arshinov, is confident that today we can talk about a much larger number of dimensions: “Models of our world are already approximately known, which contain 11, 26 and even 267 dimensions. They are not observable, but folded in a special way, yet they are present around us.”
In multidimensional space, according to the scientist, things are possible that seem incredible. Vladimir Arshinov believes that other worlds can be anything: “There are an infinite number of options. For example, one of them can be a looking glass, as in the fairy tale about Alice. That is, what is true in our world is a lie there. But this, perhaps the simplest option."

However, people are most interested in the question of whether it is possible to “touch” and see these parallel worlds. “If we take on faith the existence of a certain reality with dimensions mirroring ours,” argues Vladimir Arshinov, “then it turns out that, once there, you can, without making much effort, move in space and time. Once we return back to our world, we We will be dealing with the effect of a real time machine." To better understand this, we can take the launch of ballistic missiles as an analogy. They cannot overcome huge distances in the atmosphere - there is not enough fuel. Therefore, the rocket is launched into orbit, where it flies almost by inertia to a certain point, and then “falls” at the other end of the earth. “The same thing can be done with any object, you just have to move it to the supposed parallel world,” Arshinov claims. The only question is how to make such a transition. It is this question that excites today those who are looking for an alternative reality.

How to get there?
The existing laws of physics do not deny the bold assumption that parallel worlds can be connected by quantum tunnel transitions. This means that theoretically it is possible to move from one world to another without violating the law of conservation of energy. However, such a transition will require a colossal amount of energy, which cannot be accumulated in our entire Galaxy.

But there is another option. “There is a version that passages to parallel worlds are hidden in so-called black holes,” says Vladimir Arshinov, “they can be a kind of funnels that suck in matter.” But black holes, according to cosmologists, may actually turn out to be some kind of “wormholes” - paths from one world to another and back. “In nature, there could be space-time structures like wormholes connecting one world to another,” believes Vladimir Surdin, a senior researcher at the P. Sternberg State Astronomical Institute, Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences. “In principle, mathematics allows their existence.” The possibility of the existence of “wormholes” is not denied by Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Professor of the Department of Theoretical Physics Faculty of Physics Moscow State University Dmitry Galtsov. He confirmed to Itogi that this is one of the options for moving from one point to another at infinite speed. “True,” the physicist noted, “there is one point: no one has seen “wormholes” yet; they have yet to be found.”

This hypothesis could be confirmed by revealing the secret of the formation of new stars. Astronomers have long puzzled over the nature of the origin of some celestial bodies. From the outside it looks like matter emerging from nothing. “Such phenomena may be a consequence of matter spilling out into the Universe from parallel worlds,” Vladimir Arshinov boldly suggests. Then we can assume that any body is capable of moving to a parallel world.

Recently, the British medium Dame Forsyth made a statement that shocked the English public. She reported that she had found a passage to a parallel world. The reality she discovered turned out to be a copy of our world, only without problems, diseases and any hint of aggression. The Forsyth Discoveries were preceded by a series of mysterious disappearances of teenagers at a funhouse in Kent. In 1998, four young visitors did not leave there at once. Three years later, two more disappeared. Then again. The police were knocked down, but found no evidence of the abduction of children.

There is a lot of mystery in this story. Kent detective Sean Murphy says the missing people all knew each other and the disappearances happened on the last Thursdays of the month. Most likely, a serial maniac is “hunting” there. According to Murphy, the criminal entered the funhouse through a secret passage, which, however, was not discovered by operatives. As well as other traces of the killer’s activities. After their searches, the booth had to be closed. Whatever one may say, it turned out that the wanted teenagers almost disappeared into thin air. After the mysterious premises were closed, the disappearances stopped. “The exit to that world was in one of the distorting mirrors,” says Forsyth. - It was possible to use it, apparently, only from that side. Probably someone accidentally opened it when the first missing people were nearby. And then the teenagers who fell into this trap began to take their friends there.

Crooked mirrors were also observed by Professor Ernst Muldashev during his study of the Tibetan pyramids. According to him, many of these giant structures are associated with various sized concave, semicircular and flat stone structures, which scientists called “mirrors” because of their smooth surface. In the zone of their intended action, the members of Muldashev's expedition did not feel very well. Some saw themselves in childhood, some seemed transported to unfamiliar places. According to the scientist, through such “mirrors” standing near the pyramids, it is possible to change the flow of time and control space. Ancient legends say that such complexes were used to transition to parallel worlds, and, according to Muldashev, this cannot be considered a complete fantasy.

Hell's tunnels.
Australian parapsychologist Jean Grimbriar came to the conclusion that among the numerous anomalous zones in the world, there are about 40 tunnels leading to other worlds, of which four are in Australia and seven in America. What these “hellish tunnels” have in common is that chilling screams and moans are heard from the depths, and every year more than a hundred people disappear in them without a trace. One of the most famous places is a limestone cave in California national park, which you can enter but not exit. There aren't even any traces of the missing.

There are “hell places” in Russia too. For example, near Gelendzhik there is a mysterious mine that, according to local historians, has existed since the 18th century. It is a straight well with a diameter of about one and a half meters with seemingly polished walls. When a man ventured down into the mine a couple of years ago, at a depth of 40 meters the Geiger counter showed a sharp increase background radiation. And since several volunteers who were trying to examine the well had already died from a strange disease, the descent was immediately stopped. There are rumors that the mine has no bottom, some kind of incomprehensible life flows there, in the depths, and time in the depths of the mysterious formation violates all laws, accelerating its course. According to rumors, one guy went down into the mine, and got stuck there for a week, and he came up, already gray-haired and old.

Ioannos Kolofidis. This well has long been considered bottomless. The water in it was icy even in the heat. And then one day it was time to clean it. Kolofidis volunteered to do this work. The man put on a wetsuit and was lowered into the shaft. The work took about an hour and a half. Three people from time to time pulled up a bucket of silt. Suddenly, frequent impacts on metal were heard on the surface. It seemed that Kolofidis was begging to be picked up as soon as possible. When the poor fellow was pulled out, his comrades were almost speechless: in front of them on the ground lay a decrepit old man with absolutely white hair on his head, a long beard and in shabby, worn-out clothes. But what happened in the well remained a mystery, since Kolofidis died a few hours later. An autopsy showed that he died of old age!

Another creepy well is in Kaliningrad region. In 2004, two shabashniks, Nikolai and Mikhail, contracted to dig a well in one of the villages. At a depth of about ten meters, the diggers heard polyphonic human groans from the ground under their feet. In incredible horror, the diggers got out. Locals they bypass this “cursed place”, believing that it was there that the Nazis carried out mass executions during the war.

Disappearance in the castle.
An ancient castle, located near the town of Comcrieff (Scotland), recently became a place of disappearance for adventure lovers.

The current owner of the castle, Robert McDogli, purchased this building, not suitable for habitation, for next to nothing, simply out of love for the exotic.

“One day I stayed in the basement, where I discovered ancient books on black magic, until midnight,” says 54-year-old Robert. - Dusk fell quickly, and the blue glow emanating from the large central hall seemed strange to me. When I entered there, a bright bluish-gray sheaf of light emanating from a three-meter portrait, the colors of which during the day seemed so worn out, hit me in the face that it was impossible to see the drawing. Now I clearly saw a full-length man depicted on it, whose clothes were made from clearly inconsistent parts of costumes from different eras - from the 15th to the 20th centuries. As I came closer to take a better look, the heavy portrait fell from the wall and fell on me.

It was a miracle that Sir Robert remained alive. But rumors about what had happened spread beyond the area, and tourists began to flock to the castle. One day, two exalted elderly ladies entered and climbed into the niche that opened behind the portrait after it fell. And immediately they... disappeared into thin air. Rescuers knocked on all the walls and went through all the rooms with special radars, but did not find anyone. Psychics brought in as experts claim that a door to parallel worlds, “sealed” for centuries, opened in the castle, where the tourists moved. However, neither psychics nor police decided to test this assumption and enter the niche.

Of course, this practically does not fit in with the Big Bang theory, which describes the emergence of our Universe. This hypothesis is generally accepted and will remain so until science proves something else. “The dimensions of the Universe then were equal to zero - it was compressed into a point,” says Vladimir Arshinov. “This state is called cosmological singularity. But why, for example, not now assume that there could be not one such point, but many, and different ones, including those still unknown to humanity? And then the beginning could have been made for other worlds.”

The multiple worlds theory is still just a model. Nothing more than a beautiful way to explain many mysterious things. Science is not yet able to test it in practice. But if we assume that parallel worlds exist and are inhabited in the same way as ours, real world, then things that were hitherto inexplicable, such as various paranormal phenomena, may become clearer. True, for this it is necessary to at least wait for the appearance of the new Giordano Bruno.

Confirmations from scientists.
Albert Einstein throughout his life tried to create a “theory of everything” that would describe all the laws of the universe. Did not have time.

Today, astrophysicists suggest that the best candidate for this theory is superstring theory. It not only explains the expansion processes of our Universe, but also confirms the existence of other universes located next to us. "Cosmic strings" represent distortions of space and time. They may be larger than the Universe itself, although their thickness does not exceed the size of an atomic nucleus.

However, despite its amazing mathematical beauty and integrity, string theory has not yet found experimental confirmation. All hope lies in the Large Hadron Collider. Scientists are waiting for him not only to discover the Higgs particle, but also some supersymmetric particles. This will be a serious support for string theory, and therefore for other worlds. In the meantime, physicists are building theoretical models of other worlds.

1950s. Everett's worlds.
Science fiction writer Herbert Wells was the first to tell earthlings about parallel worlds in 1895 in his story “The Door in the Wall.” 62 years later, Princeton University graduate Hugh Everett amazed his colleagues with the topic of his doctoral dissertation on the splitting of worlds.

Here is its essence: every moment each universe is split into an unimaginable number of its own kind, and the very next moment each of these newborns is split in exactly the same way. And in this huge multitude there are many worlds in which you exist. In one world, while reading this article, you are traveling on the subway, in another, you are flying on an airplane. In one you are a king, in another you are a slave.

The impetus for the proliferation of worlds is our actions, Everett explained. As soon as we make any choice - “to be or not to be,” for example, - in the blink of an eye, two universes turned out from one. We live in one, and the second is on its own, although we are present there too.

Interesting, but... Even the father of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr, remained indifferent to this crazy idea.

1980s. Linde's worlds.
The theory of many worlds could have been forgotten. But again a science fiction writer came to the aid of scientists. Michael Moorcock, on some whim, settled all the inhabitants of his fabulous city of Tanelorn in the Multiverse. The term Multiverse immediately appeared in the works of serious scientists.

The fact is that in the 1980s, many physicists already had a mature conviction that the idea parallel universes may become one of the cornerstones of a new paradigm for the science of the structure of the universe. The main proponent of this beautiful idea was Andrei Linde. Our former compatriot, employee Physical Institute them. Lebedev Academy of Sciences, and now professor of physics at Stanford University.

Linde bases his reasoning on the basis of the Big Bang model, as a result of which a lightning-fast expanding bubble appeared - the embryo of our Universe. But if some cosmic egg turned out to be capable of giving birth to the Universe, then why cannot we assume the possibility of the existence of other similar eggs? Asking this question, Linde built a model in which inflationary universes arise continuously, budding off from their parents.

To illustrate, you can imagine a certain tank filled with water in all possible states of aggregation. There will be liquid zones, blocks of ice and bubbles of steam - they can be considered analogues of parallel universes of the inflationary model. It represents the world as a huge fractal, consisting of homogeneous pieces with different properties. Moving around this world, you will be able to smoothly move from one universe to another. True, your journey will last a long time - tens of millions of years.

1990s. Worlds of Rhys.
The logic of the reasoning of Martin Rees, professor of cosmology and astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, is approximately as follows.

The probability of the origin of life in the Universe is a priori so small that it looks like a miracle, argued Professor Rees. And if we do not proceed from the Creator hypothesis, then why not assume that Nature randomly gives birth to many parallel worlds, which serve as a field for experiments in creating life.

According to the scientist, life arose on a small planet orbiting an ordinary star in one of the ordinary galaxies of our world for the simple reason that its physical structure was favorable for this. Other worlds in the Multiverse are most likely empty.

2000s. Worlds of Tegmark.

Professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania Max Tegmark is convinced that universes can differ not only in location, cosmological properties, but also in the laws of physics. They exist outside of time and space and are almost impossible to depict.

Consider a simple universe consisting of the Sun, Earth and Moon, the physicist suggests. For an objective observer, such a universe appears to be a ring: the Earth’s orbit, “smeared” in time, seems to be wrapped in a braid - it is created by the trajectory of the Moon around the Earth. And other forms personify other physical laws.

The scientist likes to illustrate his theory using the example of playing Russian roulette. In his opinion, every time a person pulls the trigger, his universe splits into two: where the shot occurred, and where it did not. But Tegmark himself does not risk conducting such an experiment in reality - at least in our Universe.

The belief in the existence of invisible neighbors borders on fantasy. Or with a sick imagination. That's what the skeptics say. And supporters stand their ground and give as many as 10 arguments in favor of an alternative reality.

1. Many-Worlds Interpretation

The question of the uniqueness of all things worried great minds long before the authors of science fiction novels. The ancient Greek philosophers Democritus, Epicurus and Metrodorus of Chios thought about it. Alternate universes are also spoken of in Hindu sacred texts.

For official science this idea was born only in 1957. American physicist Hugh Everett created the theory of many worlds, designed to fill gaps in quantum mechanics. In particular, find out why light quanta behave either like particles or like waves.

According to Everett, each event leads to a split and copying of the Universe. In this case, the number of “clones” is always equal to the number of possible outcomes. And the sum of the central and new universes can be depicted in the form of a branched tree.

2. Artifacts of unknown civilizations

Some finds baffle even the most experienced archaeologists.

For example, a hammer discovered in London, dated to 500 million BC, that is, a period when there was not even a hint of Homosapiens on Earth!

Or a computing mechanism that allows you to determine the trajectory of stars and planets. A bronze analogue of the computer was caught in 1901 near the Greek island of Antikythera. Research on the device began in 1959 and continues to this day. In the 2000s, it was possible to calculate the approximate age of the artifact - 1st century BC.

So far nothing indicates a fake. Three versions remain: the computer was invented by representatives of an unknown ancient civilization, lost by time travelers or... planted by people from other worlds.

3. Teleportation Victim

Misterious story Spaniard Lerin Garcia's life began on an ordinary July morning when she woke up in an alien reality. But I didn’t immediately understand what had happened. It was still 2008, Lerin was 41 years old, she was in the same city and house where she went to bed.

Only the pajamas and bedding changed color overnight, and the closet ran into another room. The office where Lerin worked for 20 years was not there. Soon the ex-fiancé, who had been dismissed six months ago, materialized “at home”. Even a private detective could not figure out where the current friend of his heart had gone...

Alcohol and drug tests were negative. As well as consultation with a psychiatrist. The doctor attributed the incident to stress. The diagnosis did not satisfy Lerin and prompted her to search for information about parallel worlds. She was never able to return to her native dimension.

4. Deja vu in reverse

The essence of déjà vu does not boil down to the familiar vague feeling of “repetition” and everyday foresight. This phenomenon has an antipode - jamevu. People who have experienced it suddenly stop recognizing familiar places, old friends and scenes from films they have watched. Regular jamevu indicates mental disorders. And isolated and rare memory failures also occur in healthy people.
A striking illustration is the experiment of English neuropsychologist Chris Moulin. 92 volunteers had to write the word “doors” 30 times in a minute. As a result, 68% of subjects seriously doubted the existence of the word. A glitch in thinking or instantaneous leaps from reality to reality?

5. The Roots of Dreams

Despite the abundance research methods, the reason for the appearance of dreams remains a mystery to this day. According to the generally accepted view of sleep, the brain merely processes information accumulated in reality. And it translates it into pictures - the most convenient format for the sleeping mind. Solution number two - nervous system sends chaotic signals to the sleeping person. They are transformed into colorful visions.

According to Freud, in dreams we gain access to the subconscious. Freed from the censorship of consciousness, it hastens to tell us about repressed sexual desires. The fourth point of view was first expressed by Carl Jung. What you see in a dream is not a fantasy, but a specific continuation of a full life. Jung also saw a code in the dream images. But not from suppressed libido, but from the collective unconscious.
In the middle of the last century, psychologists started talking about the possibility of controlling sleep. Appropriate manuals have appeared. The most famous was the three-volume instruction manual by American psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge.

6. Lost between two Europes

In 1952, a strange passenger appeared at Tokyo airport. Judging by the visas and customs stamps in his passport, he has flown to Japan many times over the past 5 years. But in the “Country” column there was a certain Taured. The owner of the document assured that his homeland was a European state with a thousand-year history. The “alien” presented a driver’s license and bank statements obtained in the same mysterious country.

Citizen Taured, no less surprised than the customs officers, was left overnight at a nearby hotel. The immigration officers who arrived the next morning did not find him. According to the receptionist, the guest did not even leave the room.

Tokyo police have found no trace of the missing Taured. Either he escaped through a window on the 15th floor, or he managed to transport himself back.

7. Paranormal activity

“Alive” furniture, noises of unknown origin, ghostly silhouettes hovering in the air in photographs... Meetings with the dead occur not only in the movies. For example, many mystical incidents in the London underground.

At Aldwych station, which closed in 1994, intrepid Brits hold parties, make films and periodically see a female figure walking along the tracks. The subway section near the British Museum is occupied by the mummy of an ancient Egyptian princess. Since the 1950s, a dandy has been visiting Covent Garden, dressed in the fashion of the late 19th century and literally melting before our eyes when anyone pays attention to him...

Materialists brush aside dubious facts, believing

contacts with spirits, hallucinations, mirages and outright lies of storytellers. Then why has humanity clung to ghost stories for centuries? Perhaps the mythical kingdom of the dead is one of the alternative realities?

8. Fourth and fifth dimensions

Visible to the eye length, height and width have already been studied up and down. The same cannot be said about the other two dimensions, which are absent in Euclidean (traditional) geometry.

The scientific community has not yet delved into the intricacies of the space-time continuum discovered by Lobachevsky and Einstein. But there has already been talk about a higher – fifth – dimension, accessible only to those with psychic talents. It is also open to those who expand consciousness through spiritual practices.

If we put aside the guesses of science fiction writers, almost nothing is known about the non-obvious coordinates of the Universe. Presumably, it is from there that supernatural beings come into our three-dimensional space.

9. Rethinking the double-slit experiment

Howard Weissman is convinced that the duality of the nature of light is the result of the contact of parallel worlds. The Australian researcher's hypothesis connects Everett's many-worlds interpretation with the experience of Thomas Young.

The father of the wave theory of light published a report on the famous double-slit experiment in 1803. Jung installed a projection screen in the laboratory, and in front of it was a dense screen-screen with two parallel slits. Then light was directed onto the cracks made.

Some of the radiation behaved like electromagnetic wave– stripes of light were reflected on the rear screen, passing straight through the slits. Another half of the light flux appeared as a cluster elementary particles and scattered across the screen.
“Each of the worlds is limited by the laws of classical physics. This means that without their intersection, quantum phenomena would simply be impossible,” explains Weissman.

10. Large Hadron Collider

The multiverse is not just a theoretical model. French astrophysicist Aurélien Barrot came to this conclusion while observing the operation of the Large Hadron Collider. More precisely, the interaction of protons and ions placed in it. The collision of heavy particles produced results incompatible with conventional physics.

Barro, like Weissman, interpreted this contradiction as a consequence of the collision of parallel worlds.

Physicists from the USA and Australia tried to explain the observed quantum effects by the interaction of parallel worlds and proposed in their article for the journal Physical Review X a theory where each of the universes is described by the equations of classical physics, and the effects that we interpret as quantum are explained by the influence of different worlds on each other.

Standard view

The scientists' work was published in one of the Physical Review family of journals, published by the American Physical Society since 1913. The disciplinary affiliation of each journal is determined by the letter index after the main title. Thus, Physical Review A publishes articles on atomic physics, Physical Review C - on nuclear physics, Physical Review D - on particle physics and gravity. The publications have a high citation index and are included in the list of scientific journals by the Higher Attestation Commission of Russia.

The most common (Copenhagen) interpretation of quantum theory involves the wave function, the evolution of which is associated with the description of observable systems. In this approach, in order to find out the state of a quantum object (for example, an electron), a classical device is needed (that is, a device that obeys the laws of classical physics).

Physicist and astronomer Stefan Fini from University College London - one of the leading British universities - is convinced that traces of such collisions can be seen on maps of cosmic microwave background radiation, which is believed to have been preserved from the initial stages of the existence of the Universe and uniformly fills it. It is considered as one of the main confirmations of the Big Bang theory.

Such maps present the results of measurements of the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background radiation - hotter areas are indicated in red, cooler areas in blue. Having carefully studied the round formations present in the panorama, Feeney and his colleagues came to the conclusion that these are some kind of “cosmic potholes” left after the collision of parallel universes.

The center of such a circle is the hottest region, while closer to the periphery the colors of the spectrum become colder.

According to scientists, in the distant past there were real “battles” in space between parallel worlds, in which ours also participated. The “bubble universe” in which we live, they say, has experienced at least four such collisions.

Many cosmologists, however, have already criticized it, saying that many other hasty conclusions could easily be drawn in a similar way. The study authors agree that much remains to be tested. However, if the “bubble” theory is confirmed by future research, then humanity will be able to “look” into parallel worlds for the first time, not limited only to its own universe, they optimistically say.

This “discovery” of cosmic microwave background radiation was made a month after another group of scientists, based on similar data, questioned the theory that the Big Bang gave birth to the universe. They believe that the universe existed before him, and “big bangs” happen periodically - by cosmic standards.

Oxford University Professor Roger Penrose and Yerevan University Professor state university Vahe Gurzadyan discovered 12 concentric circles on cosmic microwave background maps, some of which contain up to five rings. The division of the circle into five rings means that during the existence of the object that displays this circle, five large-scale events were noted.

Cosmologists believe that the circles are imprints of waves of powerful gravitational radiation formed as a result of the collision of black holes during the “previous eternity” - the cosmic era that was before the Big Bang.

Black holes will eventually consume all the matter in the Universe, says Professor Penrose. With the destruction of matter, only energy will remain. And it, in turn, will cause a new Big Bang and a new “eternity”. Meanwhile, according to the current Big Bang theory, the Universe is constantly expanding, and this process will last indefinitely. Some astronomers believe that as a result it will turn into a cold, dead wasteland.

The idea of ​​the existence of parallel worlds became especially popular after astrophysicists proved that our Universe has a limited size - about 46 billion light years and a certain age - 13.8 billion years.

Several questions arise at once. What lies beyond the boundaries of the Universe? What was before its emergence from the cosmological singularity? How did the cosmological singularity arise? What does the future hold for the Universe?

The hypothesis of parallel worlds gives a rational answer: in fact, there are many universes, they exist next to ours, they are born and die, but we do not observe them, because we are not able to go beyond our own three-dimensional space, just as a beetle crawling along one side of a paper sheet is unable to see a beetle located next to it, but on the other side of the sheet.

However, it is not enough for scientists to accept a beautiful hypothesis that will streamline our understanding of the world, reducing it to everyday ideas - the presence of parallel worlds should manifest itself in various physical effects. And this is where the rub arose.

When the fact of the expansion of the Universe was comprehensively proven, and cosmologists began to build a model of its evolution from the moment of the Big Bang to the present, they were faced with a number of problems.

The first problem is related to the average density of matter, which determines the curvature of space and, in fact, the future of the world we know. If the density of matter is below critical, then its gravitational influence will be insufficient to reverse the initial expansion caused by the Big Bang, so the Universe will expand forever, gradually cooling to absolute zero.

If the density is higher than critical, then, on the contrary, over time the expansion will turn into compression, the temperature will begin to rise until a fiery superdense object is formed. If the density is equal to critical, then the Universe will balance between the two named extreme states. Physicists have calculated the critical density value - five hydrogen atoms per cubic meter. This is close to critical, although according to theory it should be much less.

The second problem is the observed homogeneity of the Universe. Microwave cosmic microwave background radiation in zones of space separated by tens of billions of light years looks the same. If space were expanding from some kind of super-hot singularity, as the Big Bang theory states, then it would be “lumpy,” that is, different intensities of microwave radiation would be observed in different zones.

The third problem is the absence of monopoles, that is, hypothetical elementary particles with a non-zero magnetic charge, the existence of which was predicted by theory.

Trying to explain the discrepancies between the Big Bang theory and real observations, the young American physicist Alan Guth proposed in 1980 an inflationary model of the Universe (from inflatio - “bloating”), according to which at the initial moment of its birth, in the period from 10^-42 seconds to 10^ -36 seconds The Universe expanded 10^50 times.

Since the model of instantaneous “bloating” removed the problems of the theory, it was enthusiastically accepted by the majority of cosmologists. Among them was the Soviet scientist Andrei Dmitrievich Linde, who undertook to explain how such a fantastic “bloating” occurred.

In 1983, he proposed his own version of the model, called the “chaotic” theory of inflation. Linde described a certain infinite proto-universe, the physical conditions of which, unfortunately, are unknown to us. However, it is filled with a “scalar field”, in which “discharges” occur from time to time, as a result of which “bubbles” of universes are formed.

“Bubbles” quickly inflate, which leads to an abrupt increase in potential energy and the emergence of elementary particles, from which matter is then composed. Thus, inflation theory provides justification for the hypothesis of the existence of parallel worlds, like an infinite number of “bubbles” inflating in an infinite “scalar field”.

If we accept inflation theory as a description of the real world order, then new questions arise. Do the parallel worlds it describes differ from ours or are they identical in everything? Is it possible to get from one world to another? What is the evolution of these worlds?

Physicists say that there can be an incredible variety of options. If in any of the newborn universes the density of matter is too high, then it will collapse very quickly. If the density of the substance, on the contrary, is too low, then they will expand forever.

It is suggested that the notorious “scalar field” is also present inside our Universe in the form of so-called “dark energy”, which continues to push galaxies apart. Therefore, it is possible that a spontaneous “discharge” may occur in our country, after which the Universe will “bloom into a bud”, giving birth to new worlds.

Swedish cosmologist Max Tegmark even put forward a mathematical universe hypothesis (also known as the Finite Ensemble), which states that any mathematically consistent set of physical laws corresponds to its own independent, but very real universe.

If the physical laws in neighboring universes are different from ours, then the conditions for evolution in them may be very unusual. Let's say there are more stable particles, such as protons, in some universe. Then there must be more chemical elements, and life forms are much more complex than here, since compounds like DNA are created from more elements.

Is it possible to reach neighboring universes? Unfortunately no. To do this, as physicists say, you need to learn to fly faster than the speed of light, which looks problematic.

Although the Gutha-Linde inflationary theory is generally accepted today, some scientists continue to criticize it, proposing their own models of the Big Bang. In addition, it has not yet been possible to detect the effects predicted by the theory.

At the same time, the very concept of the existence of parallel worlds, on the contrary, is finding more and more supporters. A careful study of the map of microwave radiation revealed an anomaly - a “relict cold spot” in the constellation Eridanus with an unusually low level radiation.

Professor Laura Mersini-Houghton from the University of North Carolina believes that this is an "imprint" of a neighboring universe from which ours may have been "inflated" - a kind of cosmological "belly button".

Another anomaly, called the "dark stream", is associated with the movement of galaxies: in 2008, a team of astrophysicists discovered that at least 1,400 clusters of galaxies are hurtling through space in a specific direction, driven by mass beyond the visible Universe.

One of the explanations, proposed by the same Laura Mersini-Houghton, is that they are attracted by the neighboring “mother” universe. For now, such assumptions are considered speculation. But, I think, the day is not far when physicists will dot all the i’s. Or they will offer a new beautiful hypothesis.