A Universe in Your Basement

..."It's actually safe to create a universe in your basement. It would not displace the universe around it even though it would grow tremendously. It would actually create its own space as it grows and in fact in a very short fraction of a second it would splice itself off completely from our Universe and evolve as an isolated closed universe growing to cosmic proportions without displacing any of the territory that we currently lay claim to." -Alan Guth (from MIT) - From a show on Parallel Universes by the BBC

Alan Guth and Andrei Linde won the The Cosmology Prize of The Peter Gruber Foundation in 2004 for their Chaotic Inflation Theory

Inflationary theory describes the very early stages of the evolution of the universe and its structure. A modification of cosmology's Big Bang theory, it holds that all matter in the universe was created during a period of inflation, as the universe expanded at an incredible rate: It doubled in size each 10 to the minus 37 seconds. (Imagine a pea growing to the size of the Milky Way in less time than the blink of an eye).

From an article: The Big Lab Experiment:

Among the many curious implications of Linde's theory, one stands out for our present purposes: It doesn't take all that much to create a universe. Resources on a cosmic scale are not required. It might even be possible for someone in a not terribly advanced civilization to cook up a new universe in a laboratory. Which leads to an arresting thought: Could that be how our universe came into being?

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I don't know about parellel universes. Or eleven dimensions. Who knows how much space they might take up. I already have enough to worry about with the planets that are taking up space in my living room.

And what if the physicist got it wrong and their new universe displaced this one. I guess we would never know.