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.

George Ellis and the multiverse

George Ellis

George Ellis is a South African cosmologist who rose to fame almost half a century ago when he wrote a book together with Stephen Hawking (The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, 1973), today considered a classic.

In an earlier post in this blog, published in November 2014, I mentioned that there are six independent theories about the multiverse, almost all of them incompatible with each other. In a recent article titled Theory Confirmation and Multiverses published in the book Why Trust a Theory?, edited by Radin Dardashti, Richard David and Karim Thébault (Cambridge University Press, 2019), George Ellis updates the different multiverse theories. He does not mention six, as I did five years ago, but nine, although he has left out one of the six I mentioned in my post (Smolin’s), perhaps because this theory has been abandoned in the meantime. The nine theories are: