we know that the Big Bang wasn't an explosion or matter in the universe would be unevenly distributed yet something pushed everything outwards and fast but what in 1980 Alan Guth a young Stanford cosmologist came up with a potential answer his theory of inflation says the observable universe expanded from being smaller than an atom to the size of a basketball almost instantaneously inflation seems to solve two big bang headaches How the Universe got so huge so quickly and why it's so flat because it inflated everywhere at once all the energy in the universe which would turn
into matter was pushed out evenly at the same time time and same pace and the first Stars grow together to become the first galaxies even here Us in the solar system we born we're seated in the event of inflation parts of the universe that are now separated by 93 billion light years once had the same Cosmic zip code to have expanded so quickly inflation must have broken one of the fundamental rules of physics but inflation says the universe expands into nothingness there was no outside of the universe the universe was everything so space itself was
inflating and space can move as fast as it wants you can't go faster than the speed of light through space but space itself is allowed to stretch and expand as fast as it wants and that's what our universe is doing the idea of inflation Smooths out the universe in kind of a peculiar way you can kind of think of it as having a a sheet with a lot of wrinkles in it and if you take that sheet and snap it really hard those wrinkles very suddenly flatten out the theory of inflation is one of the
craziest sounding ideas in the history of science so crazy that it might just be right inflation helps us to understand the inexplicable but there's a problem we don't know what triggered or powered inflation the inflationary Universe idea imagines that the Universe was suffused with some kind of ultra dense energy at Early times something that pushed the universe apart what caused there to be that hot expanding stuff we have to be humble and acknowledge that we don't know for sure but whatever started it inflation was over in a split second it didn't last very long and
this is difficult to understand how did inflation stop we don't know we got nothing folks well we got some things but it's tough it's tough but has the process of inflation really stopped one radical theory proposes if the force called inflation kickstarted the expansion of one Universe then why not another and another and another if we believe the Big Bang story a DOT smaller than an atom expanded to make a universe 93 billion light years across a theory called Cosmic inflation claims to expl expin this stupendous growth but inflation May create more questions than answers
inflation gave us more than we had bargain for we tried to come up with a mechanism that would just create our universe and stop and then quickly realized that actually just like most car factories don't produce one car and then stop but produce many cars inflation tends to produce one universe and another and a vast number of them a Multiverse it's a process called Eternal inflation it proposes that while inflation ended in our universe and led to formation of stars and galaxies we're just one small part of a vast continuously inflating Multiverse imagine a series
of bubbles next to each other those are the different universes and so our bubbles expanded and we're bumping into our neighboring universe and we're going to expand into it if the Multiverse theory is correct a big bubbling Multiverse sounds like science fiction but there is perspective evidence to back up the theory scientists have spotted an unusual mark on the cosmic microwave background that snapshot of the infant universe there's a spot in the southern hemisphere that's not necessarily the coldest spot or the biggest spot but it's the coldest biggest spot and it's strange we don't know
how to fully explain it one unproven but intriguing theory is that this area is a kind of cosmic Dent surface damage from an impact with another universe I work in the building with the people that discovered this giant cold area and they were pointing it out and saying well that doesn't make any sense why would the microwave background be like that hey maybe that's evidence of Another Universe interacting with our own that's something that when you go to lunch makes you pause if you buy into the idea of a crowded Multiverse Cosmic bangs and scrapes
are not only perfectly possible they're probable there may be many universes out side expanding under the force of inflation right now one analogy is think about a superhero that just can't be killed they keep regenerating if the Multiverse narrative is correct it places a giant question mark over the story of The Big Bang the possibility of a Multiverse suggests not just one but a whole series of Big Bangs but not all physicists by into this thesis the community is divided on the idea of the Multiverse uh predictably because there are some of us who believe
that this sort of this leap of imagination is Justified and there are others sort of hardliners who think that till we have empirical evidence this is not a scientific idea others welcome the fact that when it comes to explaining everything we're not simply stuck with the good old big bang narrative I would have felt kind of claustrophobic if it turned out that all that existed was Earth and I was happy that we discovered there was part of something bigger the solar system the Galaxy the cluster of galaxies or universe so I'd feel even better if
there's still more space out there and in parallel universes the more the marrier while it's an appealing notion without empirical evidence it's a theory requiring a leap of faith there's no reason to think that the tiny little creatures that we are actually perceive the vast true nature of reality this is still an absolute puzzle we have ideas I have ideas other people have proposed models right but we have no data really that helps us distinguish between these ideas and to be honest the ideas themselves aren't fully fleshed out support for the classic Big Bang model
seems to be increasingly shaky the latest thinking proposes not one but a whole series of Big Bangs as scientists continue to rewrite the traditional story more and more questions are being asked but for now many remain unanswered what was the origin is there even a sense to asking was there a time before time and I think the answer is yes you know our science and our math they're just incomplete [Music]