by Margaret Pearce
Stephen Hawking, a respected world mathematician and physicist, theorizes on the existence of parallel universes. He makes them sound quite logical, and leaves his audience vaguely uncomfortable about the Pandora’s Box that he has opened.
It is a tantalizing thought. Are there really other universes, with the same set of individuals and societies endlessly moving in different personal and historical directions? Do all universes run on the same ‘what if’ sets of rules? Are lives of people and destinies of nations changed by the sometimes casual, sometimes shortsighted choices made?
In another universe could I have died in childbirth at twenty-two? What if my daughter had died in a car accident when a toddler? What if I had married later in life and only had three children as someone who read my palm predicted? Would I still be me if my mother hadn’t married my father, or if my father had remained a constant figure through my formative years? Would my children have the same natures and personalities if I had married someone else?
Parallel universes are a rich source of inspiration for writers, who see their characters moved into universes changed by those odd instants in time, which shift history into different directions. The Romans remained in control of the world for the next two thousand years; Genghis Khan’s horde conquered the world and kept it subjugated; the Germans and Japanese won the Second World War; modern medicine never won the war against the decimating childhood diseases.
There are so many stories of individuals mysteriously vanishing. Maybe most of them were successful refugees from the remorseless pressures of families and debt collectors, but what if they weren’t? Did the people who vanished so mysteriously within a few steps of eye-witnesses really end up in another universe as so often theorised, or had they time slipped into the past? Was it our past they slipped into or was it another past?
There is the documented time slip into the past of two Oxford Principals, Eleanor Jordon and Charlotte Moberly who stepped back from 1901 to the Versailles of 179l. There are sufficient documented cases of individuals vanishing never to be seen again, to keep the curious tantalized and wondering.
The sceptics might be right to suggest they vanished because they wanted to, but did they choose which universe they vanished to or were they just swept willy nilly into another universe or time. Were they so desperate that they didn’t care, or had they discovered the way to move into the universe and time of their choice?
To be able to move into a favourite universe is a deep-set fantasy of every human being.
It is a favourite and contrived cliche that all the dungeons & dragons, sword and sorcery enthusiasts one day will be able to move further and further into their fantasy. A belief and faith strong enough to transport them with the extra muscle tone, language skills and martial arts fully developed for a lifetime of adventures in their favourite universe.
Maybe this is why some fundamentalist church authorities are so worried about the deep-set fantasy worlds that enthusiasts like to move into so whole-heartedly. Maybe all this whole-hearted faith and belief really does create different versions of an after-life.
Are parallel universes brought into being or filter through into reality through the fertile minds of authors? What if every time another book gets written, the parallel universe of that book is created? Think of all the worlds so painstakingly documented, mapped, populated and set spinning by writers, full blown and complete through the parallel worlds.
In some of them magic and enchantment are natural laws, and the inhabitants live their lives around those laws; some universes have primitive beliefs overseen by a pantheon of Gods with the emotional levels of four-year-olds for the unfortunate inhabitants to appease.
Writers have developed some universes with such high technology that they are metal monster worlds, carnivorous in their need for more and more metals, and contemptuous and dismissive of the natural world of growing things. Yet always managing to remain feudal in their control of the unfortunate technician inhabitants, who exist like the most miserable of serfs for the glory of greater technological progress.
Some universes, born from the diseased and negative minds of their creators, I would never want to visit. What female would want to end up on the world of Gor, a universe brought into creation for men’s deepest and most resentful fantasies against women?
What free and democratic human being would want to live in a universe of rigidly authoritarian societies that concentrate on military glory? Instead of getting themselves decently killed to the last man like the Spartans, they can call on the resources of so many worlds that their rigid and authoritarian societies become eternal, forever perpetuating the destruction and pillaging of other worlds. Always successful and triumphant, and in the dangerous position of being able to endlessly use up resources and human beings until the end of time or resources, which ever comes first.
Does a parallel universe split off fully-fledged and finished to the last degree every time a writer puts pen to paper? Is it like the secret of killing fairies, when every time children say they don’t believe a fairy really drops dead? Does a universe spring into existence full blown and complete every time an author says ‘let there be’ and creates a world in a godlike manner, complete with maps, language, natural laws and inhabitants?
Are the parallel universes in existence all along? Is the awareness of their existence filtering back into the minds of the writers so they think they are creating their own universes? Does it then become concrete and real, transferred into print and disseminated around this universe through the readers’ awareness and growing belief?
Then again, if all the parallel universes were shut like a fan so they were collapsed back into our one known real universe with its new fluid and mutating laws of physics, would we notice the difference? In case it has escaped the readers’ attention, thousands of parallel universes with all their differing laws of physics, nature, beliefs and realities are alive, well and functioning, and/or mal-functioning, under the fragile skies of our own world.
Margaret Pearce