Depending on one’s taste, there are so many types of parallel universes to choose from—alternative cosmos galore. If extra dimensions are not your thing, maybe bifurcating timelines would work. If an endless array of gigantic bubble universes seems intimidating, then perhaps a nursery of baby universes is more endearing. While there is not yet a GPS device or app to navigate through the cartography of scientifically sanctioned parallel possibilities, perhaps this guide to all things alternative will help.

Detlev van Ravenswaay / Photo Researchers, Inc

What if? Here is the simplest way to transport yourself to a parallel universe: Just imagine all the ways in which our universe might have turned out differently. Each of these might-have-been realities represents a parallel universe. The mathematician Gottfried Leibniz posited that we live in the “best of all possible worlds” (famously satirized by Voltaire in "Candide") and that all these other, unrealized, possibilities for creation would have been less desirable. His perspective has persisted for three centuries as a way of explaining why the cosmos is the way it is. Contemporary physicists who make use of the so-called Anthropic Principle argue that if the universe’s conditions were slightly different, it couldn’t have supported intelligent life, and we wouldn’t be here today to speculate about it. For example, if the inflationary era, a fleeting period of ultra-rapid growth in the very early universe, had continued for a long enough time, the stable structures we see in the cosmos today, such as stars and galaxies, couldn’t have formed. The super-quick expansion would have ripped them apart.

Alternative realities made possible by time travel: Science fiction writers relish the intricate plots woven by introducing time travellers into a story. Einstein’s general theory of relativity does not distinguish between space and time and hence hypothetically permits travels to the past, though the mechanics of such a journey are still largely beyond us. In recent decades, backward time travel ideas have been explored in serious articles published in reputable physics journals. If journeying back in time is possible, what would happen if someone changed history? Would they launch a new timeline, and hence a new universe, in which the chain of events was different? The answer won’t be known until backward time travel is either developed or ruled out.

Sum over histories: Physicist Richard Feynman had a practical, no-nonsense approach to physics, supporting notions that are potentially testable. Yet his approach to quantum field theory introduced the startling concept of reality as a weighted sum of alternative histories. For example, according to Feynman’s formulation, if two electrons approach each other, deflect and scatter, their overall behavior from start to finish must take into account every possible intermediate path—weighted according to each path’s likelihood. It is like assessing how tired someone will be after taking a walk in the woods by assuming that they somehow split up and took every possible route from entrance to exit—assigning more weight to the shortest (and therefore likeliest) paths, but still taking all of them into account.

Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics: While Feynman did not assert that the ghostly alternative histories he described represented actual parallel universes, a young graduate student, Hugh Everett III (who shared the same research advisor as Feynman, John Wheeler), made the case that they are. Everett proposed a fundamental reinterpretation of quantum mechanics in which each time that particles interact, reality bifurcates into a set of parallel streams, each representing a different possible outcome. Researchers observing the outcome of such quantum experiments would similarly split up into multiple selves—each thinking that he or she is the only one. For example, suppose a physicist named Eve wants to measure the position of an electron and there are three possible outcomes. Upon taking the measurement, she would instantly divide into three distinct selves, each recording a different result. Each version of Eve would be convinced that she was the real one—wholly unaware of her near-doppelgangers.

Copycat regions of the universe: We now turn from the exceedingly small to the incomprehensibly large. If the universe is infinite, as many cosmologists surmise, then if you travel far enough you will eventually reach regions nearly identical to ours. That’s because if you take a finite number of elements and mix them into an infinite number of combinations, eventually chance will reproduce one of the previous arrangements. It is like playing tic-tac-toe—play enough times and you are bound to repeat yourself. Hence somewhere, by pure chance, there could be a near-parallel Earth where a nearly-identical version of you is reading this article on a parchment scroll illuminated by a glowworm.

Bubble Universes and Baby Universes: In general relativity, an energy field of the right variety can trigger space to grow explosively. Researchers use this phenomenon to explain how the universe expanded so rapidly during the inflationary era. However, they’ve come to realize that if explosive expansion took place in one part of space, it probably happened elsewhere, too. Hence, myriad bubble universes could have emerged from the primordial cosmic sea of energy. We would never have access to other bubble universes, though, because they would have since moved away from us well beyond the limits of observation. Baby universes represent a related idea, in which universes would be seeded in the extreme conditions of black holes. The embryonic regions of space would then grow into successor universes in their own right.

Higher Dimensions: For this type of parallel universe, we move beyond the three dimensions of space itself and consider the possibility of a higher, unseen dimension. While such a scenario sounds a bit like "The Twilight Zone," higher dimensions are a vital part of string theory and other attempts at unifying the natural forces. If a higher dimension exists beyond space and time, why can’t we travel through it? Theorists hypothesize that the particles of matter and light cling to our three-dimensional space, preventing us from entering or even observing the extra dimension.

While our bodies have remained in our own universe, our minds have completed an excursion through a weird assortment of parallel universe possibilities. Do any of these types of parallel universes exist? If so, how are they connected? Suggestions for testing these various hypotheses are too numerous to recount in this post. I refer the reader to several interesting proposals:

Testing Many-Worlds Quantum Theory By Measuring Pattern Convergence Rates

Testing for Large Extra Dimensions with Neutrino Oscillations

Is Our Universe Inside a Bubble? First Observational Test of the 'Multiverse'

Go Deeper
Editor's picks for further reading

FQXi: Philosophy of the Multiverse
In this essay, discover why many theorists are drawn to the idea that our universe is just one among many.

NOVA: Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives
Discover web resources associated with NOVA's "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives," a film about the life and work of Hugh Everett III.

Scientific American: Parallel Universes
In this article, physicist Max Tegmark explores four "levels" of multiverses.

Today, we see galaxies rushing away from us in every direction, suggesting that, if you could press the rewind button on the entire universe, the whole thing would screech to a halt at a moment about 13.7 billion years in the past, when the entire cosmos was apparently compressed into a singularity—an infinitely small, dense point.

“How does the universe begin from such a state?” asks Alexander Vilenkin, a theoretical physicist at Tufts University. Indeed, the laws of physics as we know them break down around singularities, so physicists have devised a number of ways to sidestep the singularity problem.

One possibility is that the universe is cyclic: Every Big Bang expansion is followed by a contraction, ending in a “Big Crunch” from which a new Big Bang emerges, and so on and so on in an infinite series that extends eternally into the past and future. The idea was first proposed centuries ago, but received a fresh take from the physicists Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok in 2002. There is a problem with this elegant idea, though: the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the total amount of disorder or entropy in a system increases over time—the party-pooper law that prevents the existence of perpetual motion machines. A universe that experienced repeated cycles of expansion and contraction would have get more and more disordered over time until it began completely disordered, something we do not see in our universe. One way to avoid such increasing entropy would be for the volume of the cosmos to increase with each cycle. However, if one ran this scenario backward in time, one would still be forced to conclude the universe began with a singularity.

If our Big Bang wasn't preceded by a Big Crunch, perhaps our universe instead existed as kind of dormant seed—“like a cosmic egg,” says Vilenkin—before suddenly breaking open in the Big Bang. But here, too, there is a problem: In the uncertain world of quantum physics, the “egg” couldn’t stay stable forever. It would have expanded and contracted and could have even collapsed into nothingness. "This means it couldn't have existed forever in the past," Vilenkin said, findings he and his student Audrey Mithani detailed in the January issue of the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

But the same quantum fluctuations that could have cracked the cosmic egg could be birthing new universes as you read this, says Vilenkin. This idea, called eternal inflation, suggests that our universe is just one bubble within a larger multiverse which is perpetually popping out new bubble universes. Although inflation may have stopped in bubbles such as ours, new instances of inflation occur in the multiverse forever into the future, keeping the idea of eternal inflation true to its name. But what about the past? If one assumes that the multiverse is expanding and not contracting, then it had to have expanded from a certain point in time, Vilenkin explains. Even eternal inflation must have a beginning.

Even if the universe did have a beginning, it likely occurred so very far in the past that the cosmos might as well appear as if began an eternity ago, says theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind at Stanford University in California."We're talking about the beginning potentially occurring at time scales vastly, vastly larger than the age of our universe, longer than any time that you can name," Susskind explains. "Statistically, given this extremely long amount of time, we probably occurred very, very late in history, making us very far from the beginning, so most of the information about the beginning would be lost to us. I think we're really in the dark about what it would've been like."

Still, Vilenkin is hopeful that it might be possible to observe evidence of the beginning. In some versions of the eternal inflation model, bubbles occasionally collide, which we might detect as distortions in the cosmic microwave background radiation that pervades all of space. If there are a number of collisions between bubbles that are clumped together in one direction more than another, "that might be linked with the beginning of the universe," he said.

Vilenkin has no problem with the universe having a beginning. "I think it's possible for the universe to spontaneously appear from nothing in a natural way," he said. The key there lies again in quantum physics—even nothingness fluctuates, a fact seen with so-called virtual particles that scientists have seen pop in and out of existence, and the birth of the universe may have occurred in a similar manner.

"Of course, maybe someone will come up with another model of an eternal universe, and we'll have to start thinking about it all over again," Vilenkin said.

Go Deeper
Editor's picks for further reading

arXiv: Eternal Inflation and Its Implications
Alan Guth, the physicist who originated the inflation hypothesis, summarizes the arguments for eternal inflation.

Edge: The Cyclic Universe
Neil Turok on the past and present of the cyclic universe model.

FQXi: Did the Universe Have a Beginning?
In this podcast, Alexander Vilenkin asks whether the universe could have existed forever into the past.