I have been reading a lot of Science Fiction/Fantasy books lately (as you might see on my list of books read). The common element among most of them seem to be the idea of a multiverse - Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series (Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass), Ian McDonald's Brasyl and Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things.
While there is nothing new about Neil Gaiman's visualization of the existence of multiple Gods and their interference in the human realm, the other books are interesting in how they define "Multiverse". Philip Pullman's books have parallel universes where things that are scientifically improbable in one world seems possible in an other. Lyra (the female protagonist) and Will (the male protagonist) live in the same Oxford but in different universes.
The idea exposed in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is that of Virtual Reality (VR). One day the separation between the real and the virtual becomes so thin that people hook themselves up into VR as they are doing their tasks in real life. This is not a new idea, but the plot goes into how viruses in VR can cause a havoc in real life - the plot itself is very unconvincing, but the idea is essentially a great problem to think about. Is it possible that one day computer viruses can actually harm human brains?
The last of them is the Ian McDonald's Brasyl which draws on the ideas mentioned in The Fabric of Reality. The book Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch states a person is a set of copies in nearby parallel worlds. From Wikipedia, "This comes out in his analysis of free will: I could have chosen otherwise is analysed as Other copies of me chose otherwise."
What is interesting is that each copy chooses differently (since there are unknown number of copies there could be some with similar choices) and has a different life.
It is very exciting to think about such a multiverse. I presume religious believers will have trouble embracing multiverses into religion (though I am sure somebody is going to write in saying it is already a "fact" of Hindu philosophy).
I wonder what the other Divyas in the multiverses are doing right now?
Comments
11 weeks 5 days ago, Sumant Srivathsan wrote:
Erm, Fragile Things has multiverses? How'd I miss that bit? Unless you're referring to the planes that the Gods occupy as separate universes. That wouldn't be entirely accurate because they are individual entities that exist in other dimensions within the same universe, that's all. Is there a part where Gaiman talks about similar-but-different environments and people?
I won't say much about the actual concept itself. It seems to be a rather wasteful design to have multiple universes existing in parallel with each other. Way too much order involved in a creation that seems to thrive on entropy.
11 weeks 5 days ago, Balaji Dutt wrote:
Although I do love the concept of multiverses, my (admittedly shaky) understanding of the scientific basis for them seems to work against it.
Multiverses in part are based on the quantum uncertainty principle - because you cannot accurately predict the position of the smallest particles, there is a probability factor associated with them.
Scale this up from that level and every thing (inlcuding the entire universe) has millions of probable futures (mix in some butterfly effect here for good measure).
The thing is once you move to the realm of extremely large bodies (planets,galaxies) and the like it seems like quantum probabilities are not driving their behaviour - it's your classical (deterministic) physics and relativity theory at work. I.e, quantum forces are weak and operate at molecular level; larger objects follow classical forces - gravity, light etc.
Admittedly all of what I just said above could be total B/S but I would love to understand the scientific theory behind this explained in a more accessible way!
11 weeks 5 days ago, divya wrote:
Fragile Things, IIRC, has a few stories that have completely different "worlds" that exist without knowing/experiencing the other world. This is more obvious in an another of his novel I read (not Anansi Boys or American Gods).
I think the idea is there is no design as such and when there is no design nature orders itself in whatever best way possible. For all we know our natural forms would be those of aliens in another parallel universe!
11 weeks 5 days ago, divya wrote:
From what Deepak told me, the origin of Multiverses is from the famous Double Slit Experiment where some of the photons were visible in one setting and some other photons were visible in another setting. So, the idea being at any given time both are existing side by side (so the invisible photons are called "Shadow photons"), except they are not visible in the observable universe.
11 weeks 5 days ago, Balaji Dutt wrote:
Ahh okay - so we are saying because photons appear to be in more than 1 place at once.. all particles can be that way.. thus leading to multiple parallel universes. Hmmm.
The extension of that I guess is that collections of sub-atomic particles can also be in different positions and given the billions of particles, eventually one collection that visibly looks like you in this universe can exist in another, but chaos theory posits nothing else will be identical.
Forgive me for thinking out loud in type here.
PS: that does help explain why Ian McDonald was obsessed with "seeing" photons in Brasyl with frog-drugs :)