Is the quilted multiverse consistent with a thermodynamic arrow of time?

Yakir Aharonov, Eliahu Cohen, Tomer Shushi

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Theoretical achievements, as well as much controversy, surround multiverse theory. Various types of multiverses, with an increasing amount of complexity, were suggested and thoroughly discussed in literature by now. While these types are very different, they all share the same basic idea: our physical reality consists of more than just one universe. Each universe within a possibly huge multiverse might be slightly or even very different from the others. The quilted multiverse is one of these types, whose uniqueness arises from the postulate that every possible event will occur infinitely many times in infinitely many universes. In this paper we show that the quilted multiverse is not self-consistent due to the instability of entropy decrease under small perturbations. We therefore propose a modified version of the quilted multiverse which might overcome this shortcoming. It includes only those universes where the minimal entropy occurs at the same instant of (cosmological) time. Only these universes whose initial conditions are fine-tuned within a small phase-space region would evolve consistently to form their "close" states at present. A final boundary condition on the multiverse may further lower the amount of possible, consistent universes. Finally, some related observations regarding the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and the emergence of classicality are discussed.

Original languageEnglish
Article number4
JournalFrontiers in Physics
Volume5
Issue numberFEB
DOIs
StatePublished - 6 Feb 2018
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Aharonov, Cohen and Shushi.

Funding

We wish to thank Avshalom C. Elitzur and Daniel Rohrlich for helpful comments. YA acknowledges support of the Israel Science Foundation Grant No. 1311/14, of the ICORE Excellence Center "Circle of Light" and of DIP, the German-Israeli Project cooperation. EC was supported by ERC AdG NLST. TS thanks the John Templeton Foundation (Project ID 43297) and from the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 1190/13). The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any of these supporting foundations. A earlier version of this work is available as an arXiv preprint [16] (under arXiv.org perpetual, non-exclusive license to distribute this article).

FundersFunder number
ERC AdG NLST
John Templeton FoundationID 43297, 1190/13
Israel Science Foundation1311/14

    Keywords

    • Arrow of time
    • Many-worlds interpretation
    • Multiverse theory
    • Quantum cosmology
    • Stability

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