The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch

Author:David Deutsch
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Tags: Science
ISBN: 9780670022755
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2008-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

11

The Multiverse

The idea of a ‘doppelgänger’ (a ‘double’ of a person) is a frequent theme of science fiction. For instance, the classic television series Star Trek featured several types of doppelgänger story involving malfunctions of the ‘transporter’, the starship’s teleportation device, normally used for short-range space travel. Since teleporting something is conceptually similar to making a copy of it at a different location, one can imagine various ways in which the process could go wrong and somehow end up with two instances of each passenger – the original and the copy.

Stories vary in how similar the doppelgängers are to their originals. To share literally all their attributes, they would have to be at exactly the same location as well as looking alike. But what would that mean? Trying to make atoms coincide leads to some problematic physics – for instance, two coinciding nuclei are liable to combine to form atoms of heavier chemical elements. And if two identical human bodies were to coincide even approximately, they would explode simply because water at double its normal density exerts a pressure of hundreds of thousands of atmospheres. In fiction one could imagine different laws of physics to avoid those problems; but, even then, if the doppelgängers continued to coincide with their originals throughout the story, it would not really be about doppelgängers. Sooner or later they have to be different. Sometimes they are the good and evil ‘sides’ of the same person; sometimes they start with identical minds but become increasingly different through having different experiences.

Sometimes a doppelgänger is not copied from an original, but exists from the outset in a ‘parallel universe’. In some stories there is a ‘rift’ between universes through which one can communicate or even travel to meet one’s doppelgänger. In others, the universes remain mutually imperceptible, in which case the interest of the story (or, rather, two stories) is in how events are affected by the differences between them. For instance, the movie Sliding Doors interleaves two variants of a love story, following the fortunes of two instances of the same couple in two universes which initially differ only in one small detail. In a related genre, known as ‘alternative history’, one of the two stories need not be told explicitly because it is a part of our own history and is assumed to be known to the audience. For example, the novel Fatherland, by Robert Harris, is about a universe in which Germany won the Second World War; Robert Silverberg’s Roma Eterna is about one in which the Roman Empire did not fall.

In another class of stories, the transporter’s malfunction accidentally exiles the passengers to a ‘phantom zone’ where they are imperceptible to everyone in the ordinary world, but can see and hear them (and each other). So they have the distressing experience of yelling and gesticulating in vain to their shipmates, who are oblivious and walk right through them.

In some stories it is only copies of the travellers that are sent to a phantom zone, unbeknown to the originals.

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