Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

by Lisa Randall

This reasoning leaves us with three choices. Either our universe started with the Big Bang, the Universe has been around forever but eventually went over to the expansion that the Big Bang theory predicts, or we are one of many universes that grew out of a universe/multiverse that has always existed. This covers all the possibilities. The last one seems most likely to me in that it doesn’t assume that our world or even our particular universe is special, which is reasoning that has been invoked since the time of Copernicus. This choice also implies that just as the spatial extent of the universe—at least to my way of thinking—is more likely to be infinite than finite in size, the evolving universe is unlikely to have a beginning or end in time—even though our particular universe might. The existence of multiple emerging and eventually disappearing universes is probably the least unsatisfying of three not completely graspable possibilities.