Everyone from physicists like Michio Kaku to Marvel superheroes propagate the idea of the multiverse - an infinite set of parallel universes. But Jacob Barandes argues that any talk of multiverses is nothing more than wild speculation, be it in quantum mechanics or cosmology, and that physicists and philosophers are not doing the public a service by suggesting otherwise.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” –Carl Sagan

Our solar system is only a small part of an enormous galaxy, and our universe is filled with many billions of other galaxies. These are extraordinary claims, but we have extraordinary evidence to back them up, including vast amounts of direct photographic data from telescopes.

Readers may have heard that according to a particular interpretation of quantum theory, we’re living in a “quantum multiverse” consisting of parallel realities that exist “in superposition.” And according to certain lines of research coming out of string theory, our observable universe is only a small part of a vast “cosmic multiverse” containing other regions of space in which the fundamental laws of physics are substantially different.