Living Your Life In A Multiverse

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Searching for the alternate realities that lay alongside our own universe

When I was a kid, I loved to read comic books. And, apart from run of the mill super-heroics, my favorite stories always involved crossovers where the heroes from the main book would meet (and usually fight with) heroes from a different Universe. Some of the best were multi-issue epics where the Justice League (from Earth-1) would travel to Earth-2 and help the Justice Society defeat some threat.

The coolest part was exploring the differences between the different versions of the same heroes. Earth-2’s Batman, for example, had a daughter (the Huntress) and was pretty much retired, his mantle taken up by a grown-up Robin, who had the worst costume you can imagine. Time, it turned out, passed differently on Earth-2 and even though they seemed to be “stuck” in the late 1940s (or maybe it was the early 1950s), their heroes seemed wiser and more experienced. 

Of course if there’s an Earth-1 and an Earth-2, there’s got to be more of them, right? Right! Earth-3 was ruled by an evil version of the Justice League (led by super-jerk Ultraman) and Earth-S featured Captain Marvel (called “Shazam!” these days) and the other heroes that DC comics had acquired from Fawcett publications. (Whenever DC bought up another company, they would typically just shove their heroes onto a new Earth.)

As time went on, and these types of stories got more popular, they gave a name to this structure. They called it “The Multiverse,” and it was infinite. Anything a writer could imagine could be made “real”: Vampire Batman? Why not. Black Superman? Sure thing. A universe where evil businessman Lex Luthor becomes President? That’s insane, but, sure, why not?

Why am I writing about this in a Science column? Because, the Multiverse in no longer just the stuff of comics and science fiction, it’s now a real concept that a great many scientists are taking very seriously.

In comics, the Multiverse is usually explained as an infinite number of Universes, all existing in the same space, but being slightly out of phase with each other. Our heroes can hop from one to another using some power or tech that they have, but, normal people never even know those other worlds exist. (By the way, our world exists in these comic book Multiverses and is usually called Earth-Prime.)

In reality, the Multiverse is thought to be a little less easy to hop around in. In fact, Multiverse theory borders on pseudo-science, because, at this point, there’s no real way to experimentally test any of the different theories as to how the Multiverse might be physically structured.

The simplest of these theories is that, if the Universe is truly infinite, then it must repeat itself infinitely. So, somewhere out there, beyond the reach of our telescopes, are infinite copies of our solar system, with infinite copies of the Earth, and infinite copies of each of us.

Another theory is the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Physics. Basically, this says that for every decision that’s made, a new Universe splits off wherein a different decision was made. All these worlds are in the same “space,” just completely inaccessible to each other. 

The theory that seems closest to the comic book model is “Brane Theory.” The basic idea here is that there is a near-infinite stack of four-dimensional “branes” (short for “membranes”) that float in a higher-dimensional space. (Sort of like dollar bills in one of those cash-cyclone machines. Think of each dollar as a Universe.) Occasionally, these branes will crash into each other, and that ignites a “Big Bang” that kick-starts a new Universe.

As I said, this is all hypothetical at this point, but there is very serious research being conducted to try and find some way to test and either prove or disprove these ideas. While we wait for that to happen however, I would strongly suggest that we all read more comics, because they’re awesome and they seem to be way ahead of the curve when it comes to cutting-edge science like this.

Steven Disbrow is a programmer who specializes in e-commerce and mobile systems development, an entrepreneur, comic-book nerd, writer, improviser, actor, sometime television personality and parent of two human children.