Science fiction and the multiverse

In several previous posts (see one here), I have argued that multiverse theories are not science, as they cannot be proven false, but rather science fiction, purely imaginative creations. Further proof of this is that the idea of the multiverse did not originally arise from science, but from science fiction. Some of my reading this summer has helped me complete the proofs for this assertion.

The most common form of the multiverse, the M-theory multiverse, appeared for the first time in science fiction literature in a short story by Clifford Simak, published in 1939, which the author later developed into a novel, Cosmic Engineers, published in 1950. In this novel, the protagonists must confront the invasion of our universe by malevolent intelligent beings from another universe, who want to destroy us. To defend themselves, Earthlings establish an alliance with a civilization made up of artificial intelligences created by long-gone extraterrestrial beings, who warn them of the threat from the other universe.

Simak’s imagination combined many typical sci-fi themes in a single novel. I first read it in 1975, long before physicists seized on the idea of the multiverse to try to find an answer to fine-tuning, that powerful clue to God’s creation. As for the supposedly scientific version of this multiverse (the M-theory), it wasn't formulated until the 1990s, at the end of the 20th century, and disseminated by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in their book The Grand Design, in the 21^st century.

The quantum multiverse is the theory that Hugh Everett III proposed in 1957 to make the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics no longer indeterministic. I thought that in this case science had gotten ahead of science fiction. In another post, I said that this is one of the most absurd theories ever devised by physicists. As is well known, Everett’s theory states that every time there is a quantum collapse of a particle that can choose between two different states, the universe splits in two. Since there is a huge number of particles, and many collapse every fraction of a second, there would be an incalculable number of copies of our universe, with different histories. One consequence of this theory is that anything that can happen, would actually happen in one of the universes of the quantum multiverse. This would make the quantum multiverse deterministic.

Until recently, I thought the first time this idea was used in science fiction was in Fred Hoyle’s novel October the First Is Too Late (1966). But this summer I read a short story by Frederik Pohl entitled A Hitch in Time, published in 1947, ten years before Everett formulated his theory. In this story, Pohl not only anticipates Everett but also uses that theory to propose the same supposedly scientific solution to time travel paradoxes that David Deutsch proposed half a century later. I discussed this solution in another post.

Investigating the subject, I discovered that the first science fiction author to address the subject seems to have been Murray Leinster, who in 1934 published the short story Sidewise in Time, where several parallel universes overlap each other, causing chaos on Earth. The first could also have been David R. Daniels with his story Branches of time, published on the same year. So Everett’s theory was conceived even earlier by sci-fi writers.

Another form of the multiverse, incompatible with the previous two, is the idea that we live in a simulation, proposed by Nick Bostrom at the beginning of the 21st century, whose negligible plausibility I reviewed in this post and this post. Well, this idea was also anticipated by science fiction. I don't know when it was first done, but I can think of at least two precedents: another short story by Frederik Pohl that I reread this summer (The Tunnel Under the World, 1955) and a short story by Raymond Banks published the same year, The Short Ones, which I read a long time ago and gave me the inspiration for my novel Jacob’s Ladder, which was published in 2001 although I wrote it in 1999, several years before Bostrom published his absurd theory.

Currently, as I explained in another post, there are at least nine different theories of the multiverse. It seems that atheistic physicists are desperate to find a solution to the problem of fine-tuning and don't realize that the existence of so many alternative, incompatible theories about the multiverse, instead of making the existence of a multiverse more plausible, actually makes it less plausible, as George Ellis rightly pointed out.

It remains to be seen if physicists were influenced by science fiction writers who had the same ideas long before. Did Everett read Pohl’s, Daniels’ or Leinster’s short stories? Did the founders of the M-theory read Simak’s novel? Did Bostrom read my novel? In the latter case, I’m sure he didn’t, but I wouldn't rule out the other two cases, although we’ll probably never know. It’s even possible that, although the authors of these theories could have been influenced by their sci-fi reading, they may have been unaware of it.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread on Multiverse and Fine Tuning: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca