An Evil Twin Cosmos Could Be Behind Our Universe’s Ever-accelerating Expansion

Something is making the fabric of our Universe expand at an accelerating rate, and researchers are truly stumped on what in fact it could be. Possibly gravity starts to act naughty over cosmic scales, or maybe the roiling of pure emptiness creates some sort of negative pressure we’re yet to explain. For the time being, dark energy acts as a placeholder for descriptions of the enigmatic tide of expansion, inviting all kinds of speculation on what the phantom in the intergalactic shadows may in fact look like.

Naman Kumar, a PhD student at IIT (the Indian Institute of Technology), has a few thoughts, which he sketched recently in a couple of published papers. One of his proposals arises from the hypothesis that our Cosmos isn’t as lonely as it seems.  Rewind your watch distant enough back through the ages, you’ll ultimately get to a point where all matter was confined in a dense, hot swarm of subatomic particles churning with possibility.

And prior to that? Something-something-something quantum physics. To fill in the missing particulars, we’d require a fresh theory that seamlessly blends general relativity’s stretching fabric with the discrete threads of quantum mechanics, or substitutes both with something radical and new. Kumar’s model begins with the quantum phenomenon of matter generation. Given the right circumstances, virtual particles have a considerable chance of bursting into existence in an entangled partnership – one minute piece of matter, and an antimatter twin. This could be one charm quark and one anti-charm quark, or one positron and one electron. Or, just maybe, one Universe and one anti Universe, opines Kumar.

The proposal isn’t unprecedented. Multiverses are an apt way of filling in gaps that make our Cosmos look uncannily well suited for our very existence. A similar idea was proposed several years ago by physicists Kieran Finn, Latham Boyle, and Neil Turok from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. Finn, Boyle, and Turok argue our Cosmos looks and behaves as effortlessly as it does not thanks to a speedy period of early inflation, but as it was born with a twin that runs backward in time, identical except for its mirror-image particles and flipped charges.

Kumar’s version emerges as a resultant of a concept in quantum information theory termed relative entropy. Putting it simply, this is a metric that places a number to variances in distributions of probability across non-symmetrical systems, such as two Cosmoses connected at a point in time. Should our Cosmos have roared into existence with a backward-running, charge-flipped, mirror-image ‘twin’ inhibited by the energy conditions of general relativity in the same manner ours is, it would be entwined such that each system’s energy obviously describes a rapidly expanding radius.