Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Multiverse" in English language version.
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The dominant theme in Puranic Hindu cosmology, state Chapman and Driver, is of cycles and repetition. There are multiple universes, each takes birth from chaos, grows, decays and dies into chaos. Further, there are different and parallel realities.
The reality that the earliest Buddhism presupposed was one world system of Earth, heavens and hells [...]. In a relatively short period of time, that concept evolved into a perspective of an equally real, infinite, never-ceasing space and time, an infinity full of universes — as many as the grains of sand in the banks of the Ganges — each universe itself a cosmos.
"In some worlds there is no sun and moon, in others they are larger than in our world, and in others more numerous. The intervals between the worlds are unequal; in some parts there are more worlds, in others fewer; some are increasing, some at their height, some decreasing; in some parts they are arising, in others falling. They are destroyed by collision one with another. There are some worlds devoid of living creatures or plants or any moisture." ... Only an infinite number of atoms could have created the complexity of the known world by their random motions... In this sense, the atomist-multiverse theory of antiquity presents a striking parallel to the situation in science today. The Greek atomists' theory of the ultimate nature of matter on the smallest scales implied the existence of multiple universes on cosmic scales. Modern science's most popular attempt to describe the fundamental nature of matter—superstring theory—also turns out (much to the theorists' surprise) to imply a vast multiplicity of vacuum states, essentially the same thing as predicting the existence of a multiverse.
Why should other worlds have become the subject of scientific discourse, when they were neither among the phenomena demanding explanation?... it derived from the cosmogonic assumption of ancient atomism: the belief that the constituent bodies of the cosmos are formed by the chance coalescence of moving atoms, the same type of indivisible particles of which matter on Earth was composed... Given the occurrence of these natural processes, and the obvious example of potential stability revealed in our own finite world, it was not unreasonable to suppose the existence of other stable conglomerations. The atomists further employed the principle that when causes were present, effects must occur.6 Atoms were the agents of causality and their number was infinite. The effect was innumerable worlds in formation, in collision, and in decay."
[...] we [...] encounter an acknowledged debt to Democritus (who, like Bruno, had postulated infinite worlds) [...].
Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference, a multiverse, as one might call it, and not a universe.
Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference, a multiverse, as one might call it, and not a universe.
Theories of Anything
A pervasive idea in fundamental physics and cosmology that should be retired: the notion that we live in a multiverse in which the laws of physics and the properties of the cosmos vary randomly from one patch of space to another
The earliest hints of the multiverse are found in two ancient Greek schools of thought, the Atomists and the Stoics. The Atomists, whose philosophy dates to the fifth century B.C., argued that that the order and beauty of our world was the accidental product of atoms colliding in an infinite void. The atomic collisions also give rise to an endless number of other, parallel worlds less perfect than our own.
Leucippus and Democritus believed that their atomic theory required an infinity of worlds... Their later follower, Epicurus of Samos, also professed the reality of multiple worlds. "There are infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours"...
Theories of Anything
A pervasive idea in fundamental physics and cosmology that should be retired: the notion that we live in a multiverse in which the laws of physics and the properties of the cosmos vary randomly from one patch of space to another
