In 2056, I think you鈥檒l be able to buy a T-shirt on which are printed equations describing the unified physical laws of our universe. All the laws we have discovered so far will be derivable from these equations.
We will have confirmed beyond doubt, through observation, that what we now call the big bang wasn鈥檛 the beginning of everything, merely the time when our part of space stopped undergoing an explosive stretching called inflation. We will have understood the physics of inflation well enough to know that inflation continues forever in some faraway places, and that in other places where it has ended and allowed life to evolve, the T-shirts on sale mostly have different equations.
The existence of such 鈥減arallel universes鈥� will be no more controversial than the existence of other galaxies 鈥� then called 鈥渋sland universes鈥� 鈥� was 100 years ago. This idea was controversial until Edwin Hubble settled it in 1925.
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