The Theoretical Physicist Wore a Toga
It’s a basic human impulse to ask ourselves “what if?” What if I had made other decisions? Would things have turned out better, worse, or just different? Questions like that make the idea of multiple universes enticing — somewhere out there, they suggest, the road not taken actually was taken.
These days, scientists are increasingly interested in thinking about multiple universes. There are lots of theories in play, with names like “the quilted multiverse” and “the inflationary universe” and “the ultimate multiverse.” It all feels exciting and new. But it's not as new as you might think.
“The idea of multiple universes is about 2,500 years old,” says Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a professor of religion and philosophy at Wesleyan University. She says that long before nerds in pocket protectors were debating this stuff, nerds in togas were — the Atomist philosophers, of ancient Greece.
Kurt Andersen: How did the Atomists arrive at the theory of multiple universes?
Mary-Jane Rubenstein: If our world is the only world, then it's very difficult to explain: how is it that things are so perfect? How is it that sunsets are so beautiful? And the Atomists believed that it was not the case that some anthropomorphic god or gods made the universe so it was perfect, but that our world was one of an infinite number of other worlds. Worlds were the product of accident, of particles colliding with one another, and an infinite amount of space to play in.
On one hand, it’s really self-involved of humans to imagine we’re replicated a zillion times everywhere. On the other hand, maybe it’s not so self-involved … maybe it’s like saying, "I’m not important, there are billions of me — who cares? Let’s chill." As this notion becomes part of the popular conception of the way things work, what will be the effect on the way people think about their lives?
It's a great question. Every major development in modern Western science since Copernicus has been advertised as this radical decentralization of our importance. Copernicus takes us out of the center of the solar system, and then Darwin takes us out of the garden of Eden, Freud takes us out of control of our own psyches — as science progresses, we learn that we are less and less important than we thought we were. But, of course, we still tend to think that we run the planet.
That may be just a desperate attempt to reassert ourselves.
That’s right. It’s this funny dance between this radical decentering of the importance of humanity on the one hand, and then humanity’s reaction against that decentering to reassert its importance.
You’re a religion professor. What does contemporary religion have to say about this multiverse business?
You do run into some fascinating theological problems. For example, if you are operating in a Christian framework, are there inhabitants of those other universes, and are they fallen? If they have fallen, do they also need Christ to go there and redeem them? Is Jesus just constantly traveling from universe to universe to get incarnated, teach for 30 years, and then die?
Or are there many, many Jesuses? Maybe there’s a Bible for each earth?
If that’s the case, then theology’s got a serious problem.
