Dark Matters

“There are two things you should remember when dealing with parallel universes. One, they're not really parallel, and two, they're not really universes.”

I was thinking about Douglas Adams a few days ago, as I also recalled the undoubtedly poor first impression I must have made with my father’s oldest friend Michele when we visited her Paris flat in the summer of 1982.

She’s the lady on the left of this group in Buenos Aires, 1948. Born a year before Anne Frank, she is now 96, yet still uses the Metro and is dreading the Olympics. (I am yet to sound her out about the snap election.)

That I have managed to maintain long-term regular contact is a wonder to me as our first meeting occurred when I was in my Harry Enfield teenager phase, and had my face permanently planted in ‘Life, The Universe and Everything’. Barely managing a grunt, I possibly fancied I was cloaked by an SEP (Somebody Else’s Problem field) in reverse polarity mode.

Having just taken in the penultimate episode of Dark Matter I have also been thinking about alternate realities lately too.

Douglas Adams had the sense that these are porous, intersecting. Certainly from the perspective of the writer of fiction, this would make them a good deal more interesting and creatively functional.

The basic problem of “many worlds” for writers was explored by Larry Niven in his story ‘All The Myriad Ways’, in which mankind has found a way to mine the multiverse for its intellectual property, but along the way discovered that choice is somehow meaningless, a realisation that leads to a spate of murders and suicides. If all possible choices are made, the creator of fictional narratives might as well give up, if not exactly euthanasiastically.

Inside the box you have your dead cat/live cat...or do you? Are these mere potentialities and ultimately only one of them is realised? But, if the smallest bits of our mysteriously granular reality can genuinely be in more than one place, WHERE exactly are these other places?

I mention this because we don’t actually need superposition and a manufactured box to take this particular journey, because it is a little mentioned consequence of our current standard cosmological model that many (and I mean MANY) different versions of us exist in basically the same physical space that we inhabit.

Indeed, it has been calculated that the nearest arrangement of protons and neutrons that exactly duplicates the one that I regard as ‘me’ can be found at a distance of 1 followed by a billion billion billion zeroes, metres from my current location. (My gut feel is that Guatemalans won’t have to travel quite so far in order to confront their doubles, but given the way distances work here, the trip may take a lot longer than one might otherwise anticipate just by contemplating all the zeroes.)

This rather startling ‘fact’ is a consequence of the theory of inflation in which we find ourselves in one of a likely infinite number of ‘bubble universes’, yet because the internal dimensions of this are ‘to all intensive purposes’ (as my mother used to say) infinite, and the number of different ways protons and neutrons can be assembled are finite, it follows that there is a good deal of duplication ‘out there’.

Popular science is always a bit cagey about the parts of theory that arise from evidence and the parts which are like placeholders for a lack of it. And alternate versions of ourselves that are a long way away are somehow less immediately intriguing than those that are perhaps right here in the box with us.

I am still struggling a bit with the box in Dark Matter though. There’s only one layer of realities where its construction makes sense, so in all the others did it just materialise like a TARDIS, and why does nobody seem bothered? (The reason why the TARDIS first appeared as a London Police telephone box is that, out of the factory, it came with its own version of the somebody else’s problem field.)

What exactly is superimposed inside this big cube? Is it just the choices of whoever is inside and has taken the drug? In other words does it somehow isolate only the universes which apply to the ‘free’ choices of one human individual, and if so, doesn’t blending two conscious minds into this process add a level of unappeasable confusion?

For want of a better phrase (the one that springs to mind belongs to a parallel reality where politics were never corrected) causation is the dead cat in the box here. It doesn’t ‘choose’ to be alive or dead, it just is...or isn’t.

Our latest little 🐈‍⬛ has been dubbed ‘Hanky’ after the affectionate apodo Michele always applied to my father, born on the same date, with the name Henry on the certificate, but some time later occasionally referred to as Hank following his evacuation to an American high school environment during WWII.