I haven't read the article in question but I have read up on various multiverse
ideas.
Personally, I don't have a problem believing that this thing
we've been calling the universe might really just be the next "container" size
up from Galaxy. It wasn't all that long ago that the Milky Way was thought to be
the whole universe. If you go back far enough you'd probably find people whose
word for "universe" meant the local jungle and group of caves.
But every
advance in our understanding of things seems to point to bigger and bigger
space. So, just as our universe grew from the Earth to the Solar system, and
from the local system to the Milky Way, and from the Milky Way to a space full
of galaxies just like ours, it seems reasonable to me that all of existence
should be even bigger, and that perhaps "universe" really just means the next
biggest grouping of stuff. In fact, given our history of discoveries in this
area I would have a harder time accepting that this bubble is alone.
What
I do have a hard time believing is that a multiverse must necessarily be at odds
with El Bango Grande. I chalk up any such mutual exclusivity to the predictions
of specific theories rather than to the concept itself. Meaning, I haven't read
anything yet that definitively precludes what to me is a logical possibility:
that here in these four dimensions, and regardless of what may or may not be
happening in others, universe bubbles are banging into existence all over the
place in the same way ours did.
Of course that's a philosophical
prediction rather than a scientific one, so treat it as roughly as you like. But
if one bubble of stuff can be born in a big bang, why not others? How many one-off
things have we actually discovered out there? Zero?