Surprisingly, both string theory and inflation, which were developed quite independently, seem to point to a common conclusion: the existence of a multiverse, an enormous number of multiple independent universes. According to inflation, the universe is unable to escape “eternal inflation”: as inflation ends in one part of the universe, it continues in others, and “bubbles” of noninflating universe continually appear in the inflating region. We live in one of these bubbles; other bubbles would be their own universes, cut off from all the others, and each might have its own laws of physics and
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