Andrew Crumey - Parallel worlds: physics and literature

If human history turns on the tilt of the multiverse, can we still trust our ideas of achievement, progress and morality?

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In a proposed introduction to The Arcades Project, Benjamin compares Blanqui’s multiverse to Baudelaire’s poem ‘Les sept vieillards’ (‘The Seven Old Men’, 1857), which takes a succession of identical old men and imagines them as a single man multiplied in some ‘infamous plot’. This, says Benjamin, is an image of modernity itself. An eventual consequence of such dehumanisation was the rise of fascism. In one of his last essays on the philosophy of history, Benjamin says that to understand fascism we need to appreciate how in an oppressive regime every day is presented as a new emergency.

Andy Murray’s unexpectedly strong start against Roger Federer in the Wimbledon 2012 final put the Daily Telegraph columnist Matthew Norman in a science-fiction mood. ‘It seemed we’d been transported to one of those parallel universes into which Doctor Who likes to slip with insouciant ease,’ he commented. A year later, that alternative world became reality, as Murray took the title, leaving journalists to apply the same familiar image to others. Contrasting Murray with the doubles champion Jonny Marray — who still rents a flat and drives a Ford Fiesta, despite holding a Grand Slam title — the Daily Mail opined: ‘The stark reality is that the two champions, who share a passion for tennis, live and work in a parallel universe.’

Where did this idea of parallel universes come from? Science fiction is an obvious source: in the 1960s, Captain Kirk met his ‘other self’ in aStar Trek episode called ‘Mirror, Mirror’, while Philip K Dick’s novelThe Man in the High Castle (1963) imagined an alternate world in which the US was a Nazi puppet state. Since then, the idea has become mainstream, providing the image of forking paths in the romantic comedy Sliding Doors (1998), and the spine-chilling ‘What if?’ in Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America (2004), which envisaged the anti-Semitic aviator Charles Lindbergh defeating Roosevelt in 1940. 

But there’s also science fact. In 1935, Erwin Schrödinger proposed his famous thought experiment involving a cat in a box whose life or death is connected to a quantum event, and in 1957 the American physicist Hugh Everett developed his ‘many worlds’ theory, which proposed that the act of opening Schrödinger’s box entailed a splitting of universes: one where the cat is alive, and another where it is dead.

Recently, physicists have been boldly endorsing a ‘multiverse’ of possible worlds. Richard Feynman, for example, said that when light goes from A to B it takes every possible path, but the one we see is the quickest because all the others cancel out. In The Universe in a Nutshell(2001), Stephen Hawking went with a sporting multiverse, declaring it ‘scientific fact’ that there exists a parallel universe in which Belize won every gold medal at the Olympic Games. For Hawking, the universe is a kind of ‘cosmic casino’ whose dice rolls lead to widely divergent paths: we see one, but all are real.

Surprisingly, however, the idea of parallel universes is far older than any of these references, cropping up in philosophy and literature since ancient times. Even the word ‘multiverse’ has vintage. In a journal paper dating from 1895, William James referred to a ‘multiverse of experience’, while in his English Roses collection of 1899, the poet Frederick Orde Ward gave the term a spiritual cast: ‘Within, without, nowhere and everywhere;/Now bedrock of the mighty Multiverse...’

At the far reaches of this hidden history is Democritus, who believed the universe to be made of atoms moving in an infinite void. Over time, they would combine and recombine in every possible way: the world we see around us is just one arrangement among many that are all certain to appear. For Epicurus, who thought that atoms sometimes undergo a sudden random movement (‘swerve’) the whole future is not mapped out by mechanical principles, as it is for Democritus. Its paths are multiple. Epicureanism was the doctrine that survived into Roman times — as a philosophy of life in general, not just a physical theory. It was celebrated by Lucretius’s poem De Rerum Natura, and by Livy in a passage of the Academica:

Would you believe that there exist innumerable worlds... and that just as we are at this moment close to Bauli and are looking towards Puteoli, so there are countless persons in exactly similar spots with our names, our honours, our achievements, our minds, our shapes, our ages, discussing the very same subject?

For Epicurean atomists, history was a succession of accidental collisions. Human affairs were subject to the laws of matter, or pure chance, not the will of gods, and everywhere and always the outcomes of events might have been otherwise. Thus Livy (not an atomist, though a believer in chance) speculated on what might have transpired if Alexander the Great had invaded Italy. Such ‘What if?’ scenarios were shunned by later Christian historians, who saw divine providence as the principle guiding the grand course of human affairs. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet put it: ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,/Rough-hew them how we will.’ 

In the 17th century, the mathematician and philosopher Gottfried von Leibniz introduced a new kind of multiverse...

 read more: http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/can-the-multiverse-explain-the-course-of-history/