Unimaginable Worlds
My notes on this site primarily focus on places and histories, topics about which I have some knowledge. Some of them are yoga for the imagination, for example, the attempts to visualise prehistoric landscapes and posts on exoplanets and film sets. By contrast, my aim here is to explore a boundary of what we CAN imagine about reality. Worryingly, it involves physics and maths, so I will be plumbing the depths of my ignorance as well.
The starting point is what science tells us about the reality of our universe, and to try to make sense of it. It is the difference between knowing that E=mc² and knowing that it implies that you can't exceed the speed of light.
Scientists and mathematicians tell us that there might be different realities and different dimensions. If so, what I want is to know what these parallel worlds might be like, and because I cannot understand or articulate the maths, I want a picture, a map or a credible thought experiment.
First, though, I have to carefully thread a way through the minefield of my ignorance of both the physics and, in particular, the maths.
On a wall downstairs is a photograph of the participants in the 1927 Solvay Conference in Brussels. It must surely hold the record for the greatest density of grey matter ever assembled in a single room. You will know many of the names. Planck, Marie Curie, Einstein, Dirac, Bohr, Schrödinger, de Broglie, Pauli; the people who dissected matter, time, and space. 29 people, 17 of whom won Nobel Prizes. The only woman present, Marie Curie, won two.
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| 4th Solvay Conference 1927 |
The Conference debated the new ‘Quantum’ model of the universe, expressing their ideas mathematically, sometimes as a logical tool and sometimes just as a shorthand. In essence, it was an attempt to make sense of what the maths was telling them.
What emerged was a majority in favour of what became known as the Copenhagen Interpretation, the brainchild of Bohr and Heisinger. It described the particles that make everything up, in terms of probability rather than actuality, so you wouldn’t say where something was, but rather where it probably was, and you only knew where something was and what state it was in when you observed it. Weird, mind-blowing stuff!
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| Niles Bohr |
One outstanding doubter was the greatest of them all, Einstein, whose more concrete view of reality, based on classical physics going back to Newton, was encapsulated in his objection to laws based on probability, that ‘God does not play dice’. Another was Schrödinger, who mocked the theory by showing how the model predicted that something (in his case, a cat) could be alive and dead simultaneously.
Some of the history of this debate was encapsulated by Benjamin Labatut in a novel that was nominated for a Booker Prize, ‘When We Cease to Understand the World’. It’s a good read.
The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum mechanics has since dominated the thinking. It explained a lot, mathematically, and was supported by some observational evidence.
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| Einstein |
Thirty years later, a new contender appeared. This was dreamed up by Hugh Everett, an American physicist, apparently not while poring over a pile of erudite papers, but aided by a glass of sherry during a conversation. Great insight, bad taste; but what later became known as his ‘Many Worlds’ theory was telling us that the cat could indeed be both dead or alive, but each version lived in its own, separate strand of existence. These were in effect different and mutually inaccessible worlds, so the two versions of the cat could never meet.
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| Hugh Everett |
While Einstein looks like a boffin, Everett looks like a banker. Apparently, the maths is sound, but there is not an iota of hard evidence to support the idea. And from my point of view, and as far as the maths is concerned, it could equally as usefully expressed in cuneiform. Again, I need to be able to picture it. I don't understand why (-1 x -1 = 1), but I can just about see how it might map onto reality. I reverse a car. Then I change my mind and reverse it back again, etc etc.
In fact, Einstein, whose maths was not first-rate, and Bohr, who seems to have deferred to Heisenberg insofar as the calculations were concerned, both used the ideas of philosophers and thought experiments to navigate the constraints of classical physics. Imagining preceded calculation. So some of the big ideas arrived wrapped in a helpful analogy. Heisenberg’s cat in a box is a good example. Einstein liked them. He used a bowling ball on a rubber sheet to describe how massive objects distort spacetime and a moving train to illustrate relativity. Here is a summary of his thought experiment. Link : Relativity
Looking for analogies for the implications of the two interpretations, the best might be online video games. In the Many Worlds theory, all of the possible storylines in a game would exist simultaneously. You just happen to be playing in a single one of them. In contrast, in the Copenhagen theory, the game would involve what the industry calls a procedurally generated world, so the plot is not defined until you arrive at a certain point and look to see what happens next. Minecraft is a simple example, and a British-made space exploration game, No Man's Sky, is a more elaborate one.
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| No Man's Sky |
Alternatively, you could see Many Worlds as being like a book in which every possible move in the plot is fully developed in its own chapter, making it almost infinitely large. The cover of the book below could be illustrating the contents page, an infinitely dendritic rather than a listing arrangement. In Copenhagen, there is only one plot, but each chapter only comes into existence when you reach it.
I have already referred to the evidence, or lack of it, for the ‘Many Worlds’ approach. Should that bother the layman? Is it all alchemy? Are the scientists chasing a chimera? Maybe, but I have to suspect my own suspicions. Many people now believe that other planets in the universe might support life, and there is no proof of that either. And there was no evidence to support Einstein’s ideas about relativity until Arthur Eddington went searching for some during a solar eclipse in the South Pacific in 1922.
Multiverses first. I haven’t used the term here and will not labour over it because it isn’t so much a theory as a useful portmanteau term covering any of the multitudinous offspring from the union of geometry and physics. We are now presented with a zoo of hypothetical and entirely unimaginable universes in which some of the names seem chosen to confuse. A flat universe, like ours, is not quite as flat as its 2D cousin, the plane universe. Optiins are pictured below. Don't ask me to explain them!
In fact, the idea that there could be many universes is not new. Some ancient Greeks mooted the possibility of multiple worlds, and (dodging my eurocentrism), in a rather different context, so did the Indians. Their relationship with the pantheon of gods might have given them a head start, but as far as I know (which isn’t far!), they stuck to speculating about whether these would have different laws of nature and other properties. That’s a good question. One of the very few that I do subscribe to is the Weak Anthropic Principle, which is basically that our world is the way it is because, if it weren’t, I wouldn't be here to puzzle over it. Some of their ideas seem uncannily prescient. Maybe our ability to process wild and abstract ideas hasn’t developed much.
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| Did Democritus get there first? |
So what are we to make of all this? I don’t believe that any thoughts and ideas simply pop up in our heads, appearing from nowhere. Rather, we extrapolate from images presented to us on screens and in books. Non-fiction books and documentaries are helpful, but in the search for visualisations, films and novels might be more useful. The former presents you with a detailed and refined visualisation of other worlds and possibilities, while books give your own imagination more scope to wander and wonder.
Here, I will focus on films, which are often based on novels anyway.
The Copenhagen and Everett interpretations seem to pull both scriptwriters and novelists in different directions. Copenhagen gives you some ideas about time travel made possible by using black holes, hyperspace loops, and all of the other tricks of the Sci-fi highway engineers, to exploit gaps in the restriction of not being able to travel faster than light. The media also cheats by allowing time travel to be absolute rather than relative.
Everett gives you parallel worlds. It cheats by suggesting that these might be accessible to us in some circumstances, maybe a cosmic Ouija board, and by skimping on a lot of the detail.
That is tricky, firstly because I am not a screen junkie and, secondly, because most relevant films play fast and loose with the possibilities. For instance, I love the Marvel Cinematic Universe for its humour, but it doesn’t so much abuse the science as ignore it. In essence, it takes its comic book characters as a starting point, rather than ideas that build on the new science.
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| Marvel Universe: Deadpool & Wolverine |
For Doctor Who, travelling to strange worlds is an everyday occurrence, but for him, like the characters from the Marvel comics, restrictions on time and distance do not apply. And while his ‘TARDIS’ skips nimbly if unpredictably through time, it doesn’t actually travel through ‘Relative Dimensions’ so much as to other planets.
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| Dr Who |
In fairness, the Doctor was around before Einstein, and the series itself predates Everett. There is also the problem of meagre budgets for TV series. It has come a long way from the painted scenery, concrete studio floors and polystyrene boulders of the early productions, but the possibilities are still limited, and imagination usually focuses on alien life forms.
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| Gallifrey: The Time Lords' planet |
Some other films fit the bill perfectly. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) reflects the Copenhagen view, but a more recent offering was Annihilation (2018). It was based on a novel by Jeff VanDerMeer’s novel, which is both subtler and creepier, but the visualisation and cinematography are amazing, even if some scenes of what is supposed to look like the Everglades were in fact Windsor Great Park. Budgets are budgets!
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| Annihalation |
In it, the ‘Shimmer, ’ an entity from another dimension, distorts both your DNA and sense of reality, an orchestrated schizophrenia. At the end, the two ‘collapse’ into a single version of reality, in the same way as probability collapses into actuality when observed in the Copenhagen interpretation. Here, it is apparently a metaphor for the cancer that afflicts one of the protagonists, something that didn’t occur to me on reading it. The Shimmer, like the cancer, is not fully understood and spreads. The film and the book leave plot strands dangling and are both discombobulating and difficult to summarise. But then, so is quantum theory.
There are several others. Oppenheimer is obviously a very topical and pertinent look at the implications of physics. I didn’t watch the film, even though I am sure that Cillian Murphy was a dead ringer in the role, because I had read the book, in which the uncertainties involved in observation and interpretation are foregrounded.
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| Oppenheimer |
In Inception (2010), the only stable view of reality was shared. It used a spinning top as a metaphor (I think!) for uncertainty.
The Many Worlds interpretation is even more difficult to explore. Once again, Tarkovsky got there early. His classic Solaris, which preceded Stalker, revolves around a psychologist sent to investigate the descent into madness of the crew of a space station sent to another planet, and who finds that the place draws different perceptions of reality and truth from each of them. Each effectively inhabited a different version of reality.
This anticipates a feature of several ‘Many Worlds’ offers; they picture alternative realities as psychological rather than physical constructions. A slightly different and recent example is ‘Everything, Everywhere, All at Once’, where Evelyn, played by the wonderful Michelle Yeoh (who will always be my favourite ‘Bond’ girl!), finds alternative versions of herself being generated by every choice she makes. A myriad Evelyns exist, each with its own timeline and story.
The best ‘pure play’ on Many Worlds theory might be Dark Matter, a book by Blake Crouch, which has been turned into a TV Series, in which the protagonist finds himself in a parallel universe, living a different future, resulting from a choice he had made many years earlier. He ends up doing a tour or other alternative realities, which vary widely but are mostly centred on Chicago, in an effort to be reunited with his family. It’s an airport thriller, but a good one!
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| Dark Matter: Another Chicago? |
The maths, of course, isn’t constrained by the human wish to visualise things. Quantum geometry is now ‘a thing’ and gives us new and counter-intuitive flavours to choose from, beyond our usual four dimensions. For instance, there are (and this is Wikipedia talking) geometric dualities, mirror symmetry, topology-changing transitions, minimal possible distance scale, and other effects. Elsewhere, I encountered a Calabi-Yau Manifold, Hilbert Space, and 4D Tesseract, etc, etc. But frankly, a bit of raw geometry powered by abstract maths does less for the imagination than a game of Minecraft.
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| Calabi-Yau Manifold |
For curious but scientifically illiterate folk, these are indeed thin gruel, and I haven't forgotten what this weblog is supposed to be about! So if the Many Worlds theory is going to shovel some coal into the boiler of my imagination, I want something I can visualise that is not just a 3D drawing online or which looks uncannily like California. Perhaps this is inevitable; our imagination is conditioned by our experience, knowledge, and senses. But my aim here is to explore the boundary of what we can imagine, and this makes it seem like I have arrived at that. How can we imagine the unimaginable? There are no plans to send a film crew into another dimension!
In some ways, it seems like a version of the idea of the ‘God of the Gaps’, in which anything that cannot be adequately explained and verified by science is attributed to God.
In this case, our problem with Copenhagen, which has evidential support, is simply that it strains our comprehension. In contrast, the skeletal but mathematically neat Many Worlds theory has no other verification and, thanks to mutually inaccessibility, perhaps no possibility of achieving one. At which point are we sending for God again?
I have to conclude that I have reached the boundary of what we can imagine. Beyond is the void. It reminds me of the medieval world, where, in acknowledgement of ignorance, the mapmakers marked vast areas of land and sea as being inhabited by creatures from the zoo of nightmares. What improved them over time was exploration, not speculation, however carefully it was thought through.
The scientific and mathematical map of reality science also has big gaps, so maybe we should see the theories that have been developed so far as only representing a similar attempt to fill the voids in the map of reality with strange creatures? This appeals to my suspicion that we can be misled by mankind’s overweening belief in his own perspicacity. Rousseau said that 'the world of reality has its limits, the world of the imagination is boundless'. I can only agree with the first part of that. What 'reality' looks like beyond the quantum maths is beyond our imagination.
