In this video, I look at multiverses, which have become the big thing in movies and TV shows. Is there any science meat on that bone? Let’s take a look:
Michael Siegel
Michael Siegel is an astronomer living in Pennsylvania. He blogs at his own site, and has written a novel.
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Holy crap.
That was *GREAT*.
Yeah, the biggest problem I’ve always had with the “multiverse” thing is that it deals with “what if I didn’t answer the phone on that fateful day in 11th grade?” and not “what if Tharg decided to go left instead of right back in 10,000 BC to go hunting?”, let alone “what if the explosion happened a little bit lopsided 13.7 billion years ago?”
Nope. It’s always “everything was identical up until 1990 when the decision point was whether this one guy answered the phone.”
Like, I’m sure you know “A Sound of Thunder”. That’s kind of a multiverse story, kind of. The loss of a butterfly back in prehistoric times resulted in a vowel change at some point and also a significant shift in modern political opinion… BUT THE SAME TWO GUYS WERE RUNNING FOR OFFICE.
Give me time travel like in 12 Monkeys any day.
Hey. You should do time travel.Report
There seems to be a reliable pattern for sci-fi: powers, aliens, magic, time travel, multiverses. If you mishandle time travel, you end up with multiverses, and you’re at the end of the journey. You can do a single-line time travel story, but even that, it’s hard to mine anything from it. Either you created the present as it is, or you changed it and it’s gone forever. I liked the way Heroes handled it in the first season, never really letting you know what the rules were. But it’s hard to do that in a satisfying way.Report
I’m going through my book databases and I want to say that the main multiverse book I remember is Job: A Comedy of Justice. I remember the jumping timelines thing being interesting and the moral questions not being particularly so. Maybe I was too young. (But this one solved a handful of metaverse problems by having a deity… so maybe I shouldn’t count it.)
Single-line time travel is either like Back to the Future (you can change things!) or 12 Monkeys (you can’t change things!) and those are always fun but I think that the former will lead inevitably to equilibrium and that means something like Niven’s Law will apply (paraphrased: time travel will change things until time travel no longer exists at which things will just stay the same).Report
I remember The Timeliner Trilogy was a few years before that (although I’m sure there were others even before that). No moral quandaries from what I remember. Good read though.Report
Heinlein’s novella By His Bootstraps, where the main character — all three or four iterations of him at different ages — is caught up in multiple loops, and leaves you scratching your head over how such a loop could start.Report
Yeah, I remember reading Dean Koontz’s Lightning which posited that you cannot change the past, you can only change the future… and so time travel was used to change the future.
But the POV character was in the future that was being changed.
Which was confusing.Report
That was one of those “closed timeloop” stories, and I think Larry Niven had one as well (where an entire field of archaeology is developed to try and explain the existence of a weird knife that someone found, and at the end of the story someone steals the knife and goes back in time and loses it in the place where it was found 15000 years later…)
see also: “Transparent Aluminum”, in Star Trek, which a great deal of future construction depends on and it turns out that it never actually was invented, it just…appeared one day.Report
Wasn’t there a Next Generation story where an archeology dig in their time comes up with Data’s head?Report
San Francisco, I think. They also had an episode with a rip in the multiverse where there were thousands of Enterprises that had all made different decisions. I was thinking about that when I wrote my comment below. It negates every good decision or bit of luck from the show’s history, because they also didn’t happen.Report
I don’t think that was how they got Data’s head, though; they already had it, and it just got sent back in time and sat there for 1500 years.Report
there’s also All You Zombies, which is…interesting.Report
I recall that, I think. Not only his own father, but his own father and mother.Report
A minor point of the Cross-time engineer series is there’s a civilization which uses time travel machines as house hold appliances.
Ovens have time travel machines in them so food is cooked instantly. All violent crimes are solved because the cops can just set up cameras in the past to record what happened at that event even though they can’t change anything. If you’re watching a recording of the past, you can hit the pause button and order your minions to do something about it as long as you don’t know you didn’t.
Far as they can tell, nothing stops you from going back and changing the past. However with tens or hundreds of thousands of people, some of whom aren’t ethical, over the course of thousands of years no one has attempted to alter the past.
Put differently, no one who has attempted to change the past has lived long enough to report what happens.Report
“Put differently, no one who has attempted to change the past has lived long enough to report what happens.”
Alternatively, changing the past destroys the present by making it impossible for things to exist as they do, so of course you live in a world where nobody has tried to change the past, the same way you live in a world where you didn’t stab yourself in the carotid artery four seconds ago.*
Another fun “time-travel goofery” story is one by David Drake, where an alien race has colonized thousands of worlds even though they don’t have space travel; turns out they do have time travel, and the galactic orbital track of every planet they occupy has intersected every other planet’s orbital track at least once in the lifetime of the galaxy…
*Unless you did, in which case, why are you wasting your time reading this? Do you actually think something useful is going to appear here? Of course not. Go get a band-aid or something.Report
I go back in time and buy a lottery ticket and give it to myself.
The problem is, I already know I didn’t do that, so if I attempt to do this then something must have stopped me… like a heart attack.
The danger can’t be to the past me because I already know that he’s fine… unless I’m somehow negating my own existence by trying this.Report
The Back to the Future approach: the entire single timeline is mutable, but only people who are jumping around in time recognize it. Marty can drop a sports almanac from the 1980s in the 1950s and someone can use it to become fabulously wealthy. No one except Marty (and presumably Doc Brown) can return to the 1980s and recognize they’ve changed.
I recall some novel where one of the plot points is the timeline really, really resists changes. A person goes back intending to stop someone from committing suicide by shooting themselves with a .38 caliber revolver, right between the eyes. After multiple passes the future person manages to remove the gun entirely from the time when the suicide person is supposed to die. The suicide person opens the French doors to the balcony and is struck between the eyes by a .38 caliber meteorite.
Where’s Schilling when I need his SF recollection?Report
‘Trippy Hal’ is going to be the name of my Psychedelic Funk cover band.
I confess that I don’t find the multiverse concept particularly interesting from a moral/ethical point of view as I doubt entirely that there are entities with any continuity even if as Mike says multiple dials were spun in multiple creative events of multiple universes. Which would just be to say that the existence of multi’s is just a greater expansion of existence, which we already don’t have any good grip on understanding.
But from the narrative point of view, sure… it’s just free will jonesing.Report
The human-decision ones tend to be chunkier. If universes are created by all possibilities of a wave-function collapse, you’d have infinite universes created each time. There would be infinite number that would be different by less than a photon. That doesn’t do much for a fictional narrative.
The human-decision approach is interesting philosophically. In theory it allows for free will. Usually it’s implied that free will is the only thing that can change in an otherwise deterministic universe. But free will doesn’t really exist if every time I’m able to make a choice, I make all of them.Report
The other day I found myself thinking back on times when I could have made a single decision differently, or there could have been a small change by someone else, and my life could have turned out quite different. In the chunky multiverse for me, most of them would have me ending up in California. I’ve always like California.Report
I remember a time-travel story where time-travelers kept going insane, and it turned out this was because the many-worlds quantum interpretation was correct and when you time-travelled your mind started to perceive every alternate reality simultaneously.
Personally, my thinking is that you can’t ever time-travel, you can only travel to one of the infinite alternate universes where the time-coordinate is what you specify, so even if you go to “the past” there’s no guarantee that it’s the actual past of your current timeline. This also means you can’t travel back to your Original Timeline, because that’s now one of an infinite number of nearly-identical alternates. Which is why all those ideas about “if I invent a time machine I’ll come back to right now” can never work, because there’s no way to target the exact timeline where you said that instead of the infinite number of ones where you didn’t.Report
OK, I’m just going to do this because I think “A Einstein” makes comments of the soon-to-be-deleted variety. He mentioned Stein’s Gate, and I endorse it as well. It moves at its own pace, but it’s worth the ride.Report
I’ve always found the rawer, more pure multiverse settings genuinely discouraging in that yawning Rick and Morty nothing matters kind of sense.Report
You mention that the Big Bang may have created other universes that were in one way or another unstable and didn’t last. Does that mean our universe has the maximum level of stability? Or just enough stability to exist in its current form? What would a “more stable” universe look like (if such a thing is possible)?Report
Yeah, pretty silly to say we’re the ‘stable’ universe… probably more like high-functioning cope.Report