We're looking for a low key variation of this guy in the Disney Plus series, Loki, the God of mischief is arrested for time crimes guilty of a crime against the sacred timeline.

Absolutely not.

You have the wrong person.

This confirms there's a multiverse in the marvel cinematic universe, an idea that's been teased in previous movies.

The next Doctor Strange movie is even called the Multiverse of Madness.

But are there real scientific theories behind this fictional multiverse?

I'm Professor Michio Kaku, Professor of theoretical physics.

Let's break down the marvel multiverse.

Yeah.

In the first episode of the series, Loki goes to time jail and is subjected to this adorable cartoon orientation.

Video less unique timelines battled each other for supremacy.

But then the all knowing timekeepers emerged, bringing peace by reorganizing the multiverse into a sacred timeline.

When you watch this clip, you say to yourself, come on.

I mean this is just a cartoon, it's science fiction, but believe it or not, elements of that are actually encoded in the laws of physics.

We do believe that at the beginning of time there was chaos.

All these world lines, colliding quantum fluctuations taking place everywhere.

And out of that came our classical world are Newtonian world Isaac Newton said that time is like an arrow, It fires in one direction, never deviates.

Einstein comes along and says, no, the timeline is not an arrow, it's a river.

A river that can speed up and slow down the Quantum theory says, the river of time can fork into many rivers to create parallel realities.

We branch off continually every time we make a motion, every time we move there could be a universe where you have a twin brother or a twin sister, another universe where you could be a billionaire, another universe where you could be a mass murderer and believe it or not, you can calculate that number using quantum mechanics.

All we physicists can do is calculate the probabilities that these universes can exist, but our universe, the so called secret timeline is the common sense universe, the universe of Newton, It is the dominant timeline which is singled out in marvel comics according to marvel comics, a few of these variants that deviate from our timeline can really mess things up and create another big bang of some sort where these multiverses collide, right, But does the multiverse really look like a bunch of squiggly lines?

There are two ways of visualizing the multiverse.

One way is to look at this long timeline where we have the past, the present and the future and like a tree branches keep coming off.

There's another way of looking at it.

Einstein says that our universe is a bubble expanding that peels off a baby bubble or perhaps two bubbles collide, giving you a bigger bubble and we think that is the big bang.

Most of these bubbles pop into existence and pop right back into the vacuum, never to be seen again.

And so the vacuum that is the state of nothingness is teeming with bubble universes being created and destroyed and that's why Stephen Hawking called it the spacetime foam.

Out of the space time foam, the chaos of all these different timelines.

One bubble just kept on going and that is our universe or in the marvel language, the sacred timeline, the Newtonian world that we see around us.

Alright, so surprisingly marvel.

Cinematic universe and contemporary physics theories seem to align here.

But where do they deviate?

It deviates on the question of the T.

V.

A.

On behalf of the time variance authority.

I hereby arrest you for crimes against the sacred timeline.

The T.

V.

A.

R.

Time cops, they are the time variance authorities.

They pick out variants who will create their own timeline which will gum up the works and create a collision between multiverses.

Well, to the best of knowledge, there is no T.

V.

A.

We are from the future.

Right?

What is the T.

V.

I mean it's from the future, it sounds from the future, the future.

Right?

So what about time travel then?

There's a lot of time travel happening in Loki and in the marvel movies, Is it even possible?

I have no idea what we're talking about time travel here.

Either it's all a joke or none of it is according to Einstein's general theory of relativity time travel is possible.

We're good and in fact now we have scores of solutions of Einstein's equations which allow for time travel.

So this is an active area of theoretical research.

The quantum theory resolves the whole paradox.

Question of what happens if you alter the past to make the future impossible?

The answer is you simply altered somebody else's universe.

If you go backwards in time to save abraham Lincoln from being assassinated at the ford theater, you saved somebody else's Abraham Lincoln who looks just like your abraham Lincoln but your Lincoln died, your timeline is not altered, you've altered somebody else's timeline because the river of Time has forked into two rivers.

So marvel is taking some liberties with the physics of time travel.

Let's take a step back and see how the multiverse idea was first introduced early on in the M.

C.

U.

Everything is connected.

All nine realms, all nine realms are passing through each other and gravity light and even matter, it's crashing from one world to the other.

When you first see this thing out of the thor movies you say to yourself, come on give me a break.

This is just gobbledygook from some Hollywood script writer's imagination but actually there's some physical basis to reality.

In what he said in thor comics we have the nine realms.

Nine universes in physics we have nine spatial dimensions and one time dimension.

And so having nine realms in thor would correspond to the nine dimensions of space in string theory according to marvel comics, one dimension has the earth on it and another dimension has Asgard and what connects the two is the bi Frost bridge, the tunnel connecting parallel universes.

It is the Einstein Rosen Bridge in 1935.

Albert Einstein wrote a paper with his student Nathan Rosen connecting two black holes together.

A black hole is like a funnel.

You take one funnel, take the other funnel upside down, join them together and then you have a bridge connecting to parallel universes.

Any questions, can I have my shoe back in Spiderman?

Far from home?

Mysterio lies about being from another universe.

There are multiple realities, this is Earth dimension 616.

You're saying there's a multiverse but Peter's mind is blown.

If you read Spiderman comics, you know that Peter Parker is a nerd, his true love is science and he uses science to defeat his enemies completely changes how we understand the initial singularity.

We're talking about an eternal inflation system and how does that even work with all the quantum eternal inflation.

That's an actual theory and cosmology.

The theory basically says that big bangs happen all the time.

Even as we are speaking, multiverses are being created.

That's called internal inflation inflation is basically the creation of a baby universe, but these baby universes are being created all the time in this bubble bath of universes.

Each universe is perhaps with the laws of physics slightly altered with the flow of time, slightly different.

You can go to any physics conference where we have nobel Laureates directors of major laboratories talking about cosmology and they'll say that yes, eternal inflation!

This multiverse idea is the dominant theory in cosmology today.

This universe is only one of an infinite number.

You can't talk about the marvel multiverse without mentioning the sorcerer supreme.

And here we have Doctor Strange Horror aled through the looking glass Horrell through the Einstein Rosen bridge to another reality.

Could different universes actually look like this?

Would the laws of physics be so different?

The debate among physicists today is can the laws of physics actually change in another baby universe, Stephen Hawking Thought.

So which means that our familiar universe are benevolent universe that we know and Love may have different laws if you go through a wormhole to a different universe.

Dark universes, universes of chaos of universes where there's only darkness, no stars, only blackness, stars do not ignite in these other universes.

Life as we know, it cannot exist.

Only the chaos of randomness exists in these other universes.

Is that possible?

And the answer is yes, that's a scary thought.

But with new Loki episodes plus the Doctor Strange sequel coming soon viewers will have the multiverse on their mind for the foreseeable future.

Young people know it's science fiction for the most part, perhaps based on ideas from physics and as a consequence they may decide to make a career out of it and become a physicist.

That's how I got started.

So it helps to have young people being thrilled by some of the ideas coming from science because they know in the back of the mind.

Yes, it is science fiction after all, but maybe just maybe there's a reality that they can partake of.