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These parallel universes are popping in and out of existence and colliding all the time, like popping kernels in a popcorn kettle. However, space between the bubble universes is rapidly expanding. This imposes a cosmic quarantine where the universes are out of reach of one another.

But cosmologists are conducting observational tests of eternal inflation. The idea is that our universe should bump into a parallel universe. This would leave a telltale smudge on the cosmic microwave background.

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It's important to note that while Voyager 1 is in a new region of space, it has not left our solar system. Our solar system is defined as everything that is affected by the sun's gravitational force. That includes the Oort cloud, a spherical cloud that outlines the boundary of our solar system. It will take Voyager 1 another 300 years to reach the beginning of the Oort cloud and another 30,000 years or so to exit. It will be 40,000 years before Voyager 1 reaches the nearest star, Gliese 445, and adopts its gravitational pull.

Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.

“This is completely new and very much simpler than anything that has been done before,” said Andrew Hodges, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University who has been following the work.

The revelation that particle interactions, the most basic events in nature, may be consequences of geometry significantly advances a decades-long effort to reformulate quantum field theory, the body of laws describing elementary particles and their interactions. Interactions that were previously calculated with mathematical formulas thousands of terms long can now be described by computing the volume of the corresponding jewel-like “amplituhedron,” which yields an equivalent one-term expression.

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“They are very powerful calculational techniques, but they are also incredibly suggestive,” Skinner said. “They suggest that thinking in terms of space-time was not the right way of going about this.”

So the future of the cosmos is perhaps bright and fecund, but do not bother asking about going any deeper into the past.

We might never know what happened before inflation, at the very beginning, because inflation erases everything that came before it. All the chaos and randomness of the primordial moment are swept away, forever out of our view.