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Multiverses aren’t just limited to bad writing (need to recycle characters? undo a narrative mistake? think your audience is too dumb to understand duality in a single construct?  parallel universe to the rescue!), they also pop up in bad cosmology.  Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising as so much cosmology (like 16th century medicine) is just storytelling.  There’s precious little observation to back any of it up.  So, if your clever bit of maths only resolves general relativity and quantum mechanics if there’s a multiverse, then well, OBVIOUSLY, there’s a multiverse.  Does your argument hinge on the impossible, or the spectacularly unlikely?  No worries.  The multiverse will bail you out every time.  I mean if there’s enough universes, there’s one where all theories, no matter how bad, win someone a nobel prize, right? But logic and our own observations tell us that this multiverse is just so much pholigston or phrenology. How would it work? Either they’re forking all the time (every time something happens anywhere), or they were all there at the beginning and having been running in some unthinkably massive parallelism. The forking doesn’t work because it requires a transfer of information (everything exactly the same, except Bad Kirk, Bad Kirk with that[…]

And also with you.  (Not your spirit, you.  A special circle of hell is reserved for the persnickety Latin nerd responsible for that abomination.  Plus it’s wrong.)  These are not the gravitons you’re looking for. Imagine you are a mostly 2D being who lives on a 2D surface.  Like a piece of paper, or maybe a box a board game comes in.  Maybe in your happy little world its a happy little piece of plywood.  You like soccer and you have a bag full of soccer balls and you dump them out in front of you (okay they’re soccer circles, not balls).  Now image we tilt the surface.  The circles would start sliding to the lower side.  Heading towards some local center of gravity, say the center of the earth, even though that’s wrong.  How would explain why your soccer circles were moving towards one side of your surface?  You have no idea that one side of your surface is lower than the other.  You just know the circles are all heading in one direction. Perhaps there’s a force that’s pulling them there or pushing them there.  Soccer circles don’t just move by themselves. Okay now imagine you’re a 3D[…]

Math is a human language.  The universe, contrary to some religious claptrap on the interwebs, is not made of math, and, in fact, math, while incredibly useful and powerful compared to, I don’t know, using your fingers, does a rather poor job at describing the universe. The problem isn’t the math.  It’s us.  Our brains aren’t limited to reality.  We can imagine unicorns, immovable objects, honest politicians.  Bat shit crazy stuff. The universe just is.  Math is one way we try and make sense of it.  But we invented it and we believe some crazy stuff and so math has some crazy stuff in it. To the best of our knowledge the universe contains (or is) a finite amount of energy that can be transmuted, but not created or destroyed (don’t start, quantum physicists, we’ll get to that nonsense in another article).  To the best of our knowledge there can’t be a negative number of hydrogen atoms or photons in the universe.  To the best of our knowledge, no part of the universe (spoiler alert) is imaginary. So how come so many cosmologists, astronomers, mathematicians, and other assorted people say things like “infinite” and “singularity” (infinitely small, or at least packed[…]

The universe is expanding we are told.  Not just that, but the expansion is increasing, meaning its getting bigger at a faster rate now than it was getting bigger before.  There’s no set chart of the history of the relative expansion and, of course, even if there was, the time scale would also have to be relative, and it would probably still be wrong, even if the current expansion rate were correct, which it isn’t. First, the universe isn’t expanding.  The shape is just changing.  3D space is getting bigger.  MD space is getting smaller.   That is, if you think of MD as warped or curved (again, fun to think of what it curves into) then the shape of the universe is getting more 3D and less warped.  Because all the energy (and mass which is just another way of saying and being energy) is getting more spread out in 3D space and it is a hall mark of energy and matter that the closer together they are, the more they warp MD space and the further apart they are, the less they warp MD space.  So the universe is contracting as well as expanding depending on how you think of it.[…]

The first law of thermodynamics is: you do not talk about thermodynamics.  It’s not a big secret.  It’s just a confusing set of observations (called ‘Laws’, because the 12th law of physics is to call all your observations laws and it makes it harder for (some) people to argue with you).  It sort of works where it works and doesn’t where it doesn’t.  Chemists and mechanical engineers find it, I don’t know, calming.  It’s mostly nonsense.  We could ignore it, but Cosmologists apply it to lots of Cosmology things (time, the expansion of the universe, etc.) The whole thing starts on a shaky foundation.  The energy and work of a system.  Lots of people find it useful to look at heat and other forms of energy in some small, often arbitrary container.  It can be extremely useful to figure out how big a boom your bomb might make or how many horsepower that blower might add to your Charger.  You know… air conditioning. So we pretend that there are isolated systems, even though the universe doesn’t seem to allow us to isolate ourselves or anything else from it.  But, within those ‘systems’ we abstract, there are some ideas that work, sort[…]

The best available answer from cosmologists is that the universe is somewhere just shy of 14 billion years old.  Some answers given are remarkably specific, some are ranges, but there seems to be some general consensus that converges, more or less, on this number. https://www.space.com/24054-how-old-is-the-universe.html https://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_age.html https://books.google.com/books/about/Origins_Fourteen_Billion_Years_of_Cosmic.html?id=m0_LGjZkxpQC&source=kp_cover However, that answer is almost certainly incorrect, and is, as is the question itself, somewhat meaningless. First, as we run back the clock on the universe, all the mass in the universe occupied less 3D space (and more MD space).  Forgetting for a moment that it never got to a point (there’s no such thing as a singularity), when it was all squished together (please excuse the technical jargon), time did not run at the same speed as it runs for us now and here.  In fact, time doesn’t run at the same speed almost anywhere, but in the early universe it would have run extremely slowly.  Like, A LOT more slowly.  Such that our frame of reference has no real meaning. Speaking of a frame of reference, whether it be a pendulum, the regular decay of large elements, things rotating around each other at regular intervals, any way we can conceive of to track[…]