New study finds no sign of entanglement with other universes

Somewhere in the multiverse
you’re having a good day.

The German Autobahn is famous for its lack of speed limits, and yet the greatest speed limit of all comes from a German: Nothing, Albert Einstein taught us, is allowed to travel faster than light. This doesn’t prevent our ideas from racing, but sometimes it prevents us from ticketing them.

If we live in an eternally inflating multiverse that contains a vast number of universes, then the other universes recede from us faster than light. We are hence “causally disconnected” from the rest of the multiverse, separated from the other universes by the ongoing exponential expansion of space, unable to ever make a measurement that could confirm their existence. It is this causal disconnect that has lead multiverse critics to complain the idea isn’t within the realm of science.

There are however some situations in which a multiverse can give rise to observable consequences. One is that our universe might in the past have collided with another universe, which would have left a tell-tale signature in the cosmic microwave background. Unfortunately, no evidence for this has been found.

Another proposal for how to test the multiverse is to exploit the subtle non-locality that quantum mechanics gives rise to. If we live in an ensemble of universes, and these universes started out in an entangled quantum state, then we might be able to today detect relics of their past entanglement.

This idea was made concrete by Richard Holman, Laura Mersini-Houghton, and Tomo Takahashi ten years ago. In their model (hep-th/0611223, hep-th/0612142), the original entanglement present among universes in the landscape decays and effectively leaves a correction to the potential that gives rise to inflation in our universe. This corrected potential in return affects observables that we can measure today.

The particular way of Mersini-Houghton and Holman to include entanglement in the landscape isn’t by any means derived from first principles. It is a phenomenological construction that implicitly makes many assumptions about the way quantum effects are realized on the landscape. But, hey, it’s a model that makes predictions, and in theoretical high energy today that’s something to be grateful for.

They predicted back then that such an entanglement-corrected cosmology would in particular affect the physics on very large scales, giving rise to a modulation of the power spectrum that makes the cold spot a more likely appearance, a suppression of the power at large angular scale, and an alignment in the directions in which large structures move – the so-called “dark flow.” The tentative evidence of a dark flow, which was predicted in 2008 had gone by 2013. But this disagreement with the data didn’t do much to the popularity of the model in the press.

In a recent paper, William Kinney from the University at Buffalo put to test the multiverse-entanglement with the most recent cosmological data:

Limits on Entanglement Effects in the String Landscape from Planck and BICEP/Keck Data
William H. Kinney
arXiv:1606.00672 [astro-ph.CO]

The brief summary is that not only hasn’t he found any evidence for the entanglement-modification, he has ruled out the formerly proposed model for two general types of inflationary potentials. The first, a generic exponential inflation, is by itself incompatible with the data, but adding the entanglement correction doesn’t help to make it fit. The second, Starobinski inflation, is by itself a good fit to the data, but the entanglement correction spoils the fit.

Much to my puzzlement, his analysis also shows that some of the predictions of the original model (such as the modulation of the power spectrum) weren’t predictions to begin with, because Kinney in his calculation found that there are choices of parameters in which these effects don’t appear at all.

Leaving aside that this sheds a rather odd light on the original predictions, it’s not even clear exactly what has been ruled out here. What Kinney’s analysis does is to exclude a particular form of the effective potential for inflation (the one with the entanglement modification). This potential is, in the model by Holman and Mersini-Houghton, a function of the original potential (the one without the entanglement correction). Rather than ruling out the entanglement-modification, I can hence interpret this result to mean that the original potential just wasn’t the right one.

Or, in other words, how am I to know that one can’t find some other potential that will fit the data after adding the entanglement correction. The only difficulty I see in this would be to ensure that the uncorrected potential should still lead to eternal inflation.

To add meat to an unfalsifiable idea that made predictions which weren’t, one of the authors who proposed the entanglement model, Laura Mersini-Houghton, is apparently quite unhappy with Kinney’s paper and tries to use an intellectual property claim to get it removed from the arXiv (see comments for details). I will resist the temptation to comment on the matter and simply direct you to the Wikipedia entry on the Streisand Effect. Dear Internet, please do your job.

For better or worse, I have in the last years been dragged into a discussion about what is and isn’t science, which has forced me to think more about the multiverse than I and my infinitely many copies believe is good for their sanity. After this latter episode, the status is that I side with Joe Silk who captured it well: “[O]ne can always find inflationary models to explain whatever phenomenon is represented by the flavour of the month.”