Is the Universe all that is? Apparently not. Last month Penrose published an important paper claiming that he was able to observe evidence in the Cosmic Background Radiation that indicated there was a Universe that existed before ours did. (Leading people to reconsider the Oscillating Universe model I suppose.)

“Today, another group says they’ve found something else in the echo of the Big Bang. These guys start with a different model of the universe called eternal inflation. In this way of thinking, the universe we see is merely a bubble in a much larger cosmos. This cosmos is filled with other bubbles, all of which are other universes where the laws of physics may be dramatically different to ours.

[…] Stephen Feeney at University College London and a few pals say they’ve found tentative evidence of this bruising in the form of circular patterns in cosmic microwave background. In fact, they’ve found four bruises, implying that our universe must have smashed into other bubbles at least four times in the past.

Pretty big deal this. The initial objections to Penrose’s paper was that he hadn’t properly dealt with the instrumentation noise in analyzing the data to find what he says he found. But there’s been a number of groups that have announced in the last few weeks that they’ve been able to verify what he’s seeing.

So using the same techniques, it’s likely that today’s announcement of up to four other Universes probable will too.

Full article here.

Well. This is getting interesting all of a sudden. Suddenly the Anthropic principle is worth revisiting seriously. I’m guessing that the counter-arguments against Intelligent Design just got a serious amount of reinforcements.