National Geographic - Parallel Universes

Science, Physics and Philosophy
Multiverse, the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes
The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics

Parallel Universes And How To Change Reality

Disclose.tv - Parallel Universes and how to change reality Video

Wonderland or Parallel-Land

Alice in Wonderland (1865), classic Victorian fairy tale by Lewis Carroll (Latinized pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832–98). First published as Alice's Adventures Under Ground (1863), it was inspired by a boating party with Alice Liddell and her sisters, daughters of an Oxford don. The fictional Alice is a 7‐year‐old who falls down a rabbit hole, changes from microscopic to telescopic proportions, and encounters a hookah‐smoking Caterpillar, Mock Turtle, and Cheshire Cat. This early version was expanded to include the Mad Tea Party, the Pig and Pepper episode with the Ugly Duchess, Alice's trial by the Queen of Hearts, and parodies such as ‘Speak Roughly to Your Little Boy’ and ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat’. The revised text also included illustrations by John Tenniel, the political cartoonist for Punch who also worked on the sequel. Through the Looking‐Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) has Alice participating in a Rabelaisian living chess game with Red and White Queens and a White Knight. On her way to becoming a Queen, she meets talking flowers, a battling Lion and Unicorn, Humpty Dumpty, and the twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who recite ‘You Are Old, Father William’ and ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’. ‘Jabberwocky’, perhaps the most celebrated English nonsense poem, and ‘Upon the Lonely Moor’, a parody of Wordsworth, are also included.

The fact that nonsense and literary parody coexist in these novels underscores the dual nature of their child/adult readership—and their author. Often described as a Jekyll‐and‐Hyde personality, C. L. Dodgson was a celebrated Victorian photographer, ordained deacon, and Oxford don who delivered dry mathematics lectures and published logic texts. As the pseudonymous Lewis Carroll, however, he wrote whimsical fiction that challenged the moralizing children's literature of the period. His Alice is in the tradition of the abandoned child heroine, but the Wonderland she explores borders on Victorian Gothic horror fiction. Carroll's originality was to combine the two genres. He tempered his allegorical portrait of socio‐economic upheaval with humorous doses of thought‐provoking paradox. This fresh didacticism made his ‘love‐gift of a fairy‐tale’ so popular that his books were second only to the Bible in bourgeois Victorian nurseries.

Alice's commercial value rose as she was reproduced on everything from teapots to chess sets. Marketing reached new heights with playing cards, puzzles, songs, plays, and broadcasts once the copyright expired in 1907. Alice, the Mad Hatter, and the Ugly Duchess had long entered national folklore by 1928, when Sotheby's auctioned the original manuscript for the unheard‐of sum of £15, 400; it was later sold to the Parke‐Bernet Galleries for $50, 000. In 1948, to show its appreciation of Britain's war efforts, the United States donated this national treasure to the British Museum—where it was received by no less than the Archbishop of Canterbury.

What in the Alice books could possibly have commanded such respect? For many, Alice is the epitome of the brave Victorian innocent in a confusing magical land. Translated into languages ranging from Swahili to Esperanto, her fairy tales are surpassed only by Shakespeare and the Bible for expressions that have entered the English language (such as ‘mad as a hatter’). Given this lofty company, it is little wonder that those who wax nostalgic for these children's books find it a sin to dissect them. Psychoanalysts, for example, puncture the Alice books' myth of childhood innocence. Focusing on the author's sexuality, they document his fantasies about becoming a little girl and cite scores of letters to ‘little‐girlfriends’ whom he adored kissing, sometimes photographing or drawing them in the nude. They also speculate on his attraction and rumoured marriage proposal to young Alice Liddell, and find phallic symbolism in the fictional Alice's snake‐like neck and bodily distortions from large to small. Freudians feel that this may also represent a return to the womb; others posit a hallucinogenic drug experience. Literary historians, on the other hand, note that Gulliver and Micromégas underwent similar changes, and place the Alice books in the satiric tradition of Swift and Voltaire. Socio‐political criticism of a fragmented bourgeois society is also noted by historians: they find parallels with the dizzying pace at which the early Industrial Revolution reacted to technological, demographic, and political changes as it embraced industrialization, laissez‐faire capitalism, and a free‐market economy. Still others analyse Alice's dream and parallel universe that violate spatio‐temporal laws. For them, Alice exists in an eternal moment out of time, a Heideggerian space between consciousness and reality where she poses existential questions of identity and confronts problems of maturation. Moreover, she must function in a metaphorical world where everyone is ‘quite mad’ and relationships are paradoxical. Indeed, linguistic and physical realities rarely coincide in Wonderland, and semioticians annotate disjunctions between sign and signifier whenever smiles represent Cheshire cats or boys turn into pigs. In addition to Alice's numerous meta‐referential allusions to her own fairy tale, they examine Carroll's linguistic experimentation and portmanteau words with reference to Edward Lear (a contemporary) and James Joyce (who was reared on the Alice books). Carroll's marvellous images are balanced by Tenniel's illustrations, which caricatured real‐life politicians like Disraeli (the Unicorn) and Gladstone (the Lion). It is in this combination of text and image, of fantasy and reality, of the abstract and the concrete that Alice's dual readership finds meaning and enjoyment.

Alice's enduring influence is attested by some 200 pastiches and parodies, some reproduced in Carolyn Sigler's Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll's Alice Books (1997). Many of these texts were produced by Victorian women writers: just as the Alice books comment on Victorian girlhood, so these imitations construct women's cultural authority. Other texts were blatantly didactic, still others were humorously political. All were subversive. Their popularity waned during the 1920s when Alice left popular culture for high culture and was appropriated by scholars and theorists. Film‐makers adopted her as well, and her representations ranging from Disney animation (1951) to pornographic musicals (1976) underscore her mythic capacity to adapt to genres for both children and adults. Today's Alice, a bit wiser than Carroll's, is a postmodern empowered heroine in control of Wonderlands of her own (feminist) design.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold (ed.), Lewis Carroll (1987).
Gardner, Martin, The Annotated Alice (1960).
Heath, Peter, The Philosopher's Alice (1974).
Rackin, Donald, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking‐Glass: Nonsense, Sense, and Meaning (1991).
Sigler, Carolyn (ed.), Alternative Alices: Visions and Revisions of Lewis Carroll's Alice Books (1997).
— Mary Louise Ennis

The Theory of Parallel Universes

By Andrew Zimmerman Jones and Daniel Robbins
The multiverse is a theory in which our universe is not the only one, but states that many universes exist parallel to each other. These distinct universes within the multiverse theory are called parallel universes. A variety of different theories lend themselves to a multiverse viewpoint.

Not all physicists really believe that these universes exist. Even fewer believe that it would ever be possible to contact these parallel universes.

Level 1: If you go far enough, you’ll get back home
The idea of Level 1 parallel universes basically says that space is so big that the rules of probability imply that surely, somewhere else out there, are other planets exactly like Earth. In fact, an infinite universe would have infinitely many planets, and on some of them, the events that play out would be virtually identical to those on our own Earth.

We don’t see these other universes because our cosmic vision is limited by the speed of light — the ultimate speed limit. Light started traveling at the moment of the big bang, about 14 billion years ago, and so we can’t see any further than about 14 billion light-years (a bit farther, since space is expanding). This volume of space is called the Hubble volume and represents our observable universe.

The existence of Level 1 parallel universes depends on two assumptions:

The universe is infinite (or virtually so).

Within an infinite universe, every single possible configuration of particles in a Hubble volume takes place multiple times.

If Level 1 parallel universes do exist, reaching one is virtually (but not entirely) impossible. For one thing, we wouldn’t know where to look for one because, by definition, a Level 1 parallel universe is so far away that no message can ever get from us to them, or them to us. (Remember, we can only get messages from within our own Hubble volume.)

Level 2: If you go far enough, you’ll fall into wonderland
In a Level 2 parallel universe, regions of space are continuing to undergo an inflation phase. Because of the continuing inflationary phase in these universes, space between us and the other universes is literally expanding faster than the speed of light — and they are, therefore, completely unreachable.

Two possible theories present reasons to believe that Level 2 parallel universes may exist: eternal inflation and ekpyrotic theory.

In eternal inflation, recall that the quantum fluctuations in the early universe’s vacuum energy caused bubble universes to be created all over the place, expanding through their inflation stages at different rates. The initial condition of these universes is assumed to be at a maximum energy level, although at least one variant, chaotic inflation, predicts that the initial condition can be chaotically chosen as any energy level, which may have no maximum, and the results will be the same.

The findings of eternal inflation mean that when inflation starts, it produces not just one universe, but an infinite number of universes.

Right now, the only noninflationary model that carries any kind of weight is the ekpyrotic model, which is so new that it’s still highly speculative.

In the ekpyrotic theory picture, if the universe is the region that results when two branes collide, then the branes could actually collide in multiple locations. Consider flapping a sheet up and down rapidly onto the surface of a bed. The sheet doesn’t touch the bed only in one location, but rather touches it in multiple locations. If the sheet were a brane, then each point of collision would create its own universe with its own initial conditions.

There’s no reason to expect that branes collide in only one place, so the ekpyrotic theory makes it very probable that there are other universes in other locations, expanding even as you consider this possibility.

Level 3: If you stay where you are, you’ll run into yourself
A Level 3 parallel universe is a consequence of the many worlds interpretation (MWI) from quantum physics in which every single quantum possibility inherent in the quantum wavefunction becomes a real possibility in some reality. When the average person (especially a science fiction fan) thinks of a “parallel universe,” he’s probably thinking of Level 3 parallel universes.

Level 3 parallel universes are different from the others posed because they take place in the same space and time as our own universe, but you still have no way to access them. You have never had and will never have contact with any Level 1 or Level 2 universe (we assume), but you’re continually in contact with Level 3 universes — every moment of your life, every decision you make, is causing a split of your “now” self into an infinite number of future selves, all of which are unaware of each other.

Though we talk of the universe “splitting,” this isn’t precisely true. From a mathematical standpoint, there’s only one wavefunction, and it evolves over time. The superpositions of different universes all coexist simultaneously in the same infinite-dimensional Hilbert space. These separate, coexisting universes interfere with each other, yielding the bizarre quantum behaviors.

Of the four types of universes, Level 3 parallel universes have the least to do with string theory directly.

Level 4: Somewhere over the rainbow, there’s a magical land
A Level 4 parallel universe is the strangest place (and most controversial prediction) of all, because it would follow fundamentally different mathematical laws of nature than our universe. In short, any universe that physicists can get to work out on paper would exist, based on the mathematical democracy principle: Any universe that is mathematically possible has equal possibility of actually existing.

Parrallel Worlds - Parrallel Lives

Musician Mark Oliver Everett (also known simply as "E") is the founder of the indie rock band Eels. One of the interesting things about E's life is that his father was Hugh Everett, a mathematics genius who originated the "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum physics, a theory which essentially suggests that each time a decision is made a parallel universe branches off, creating a very large (perhaps infinite) number of parallel universes. Therefore, everything that could possibly have happened in our past but didn't, "has" occurred in the past of another parallel universe. Many-worlds is now considered a mainstream theory in quantum physics.

However, Hugh Everett was a very distant father, and he died prematurely in 1982, when Mark Everett was just 19. In a wonderful, witty documentary, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, Mark goes in search of his father and his research into parallel worlds by visiting old friends, talking to modern quantum physicists, and looking through his father's old documents and audio tapes.