The world is notenough
Alternate timelines, secret portals, evil doppelgangers, infinite realities in infinite dimensions. Tales set in the multiverse have taken over our screens. See how far-flung fantasies are helping make sense of the only world we know
In July, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige announced the launch of Phases 5 and 6 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the most successful movie franchise in history. Phase 5 would begin with Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania and the TV series Secret Invasion in 2023. Phase 6 would end with two Avengers films, …The Kang Dynasty and …Secret Wars, in 2025-26. “That will complete the second saga of the MCU, which is, of course, The Multiverse Saga,” Feige said.
It seems like one can’t escape the multiverse these days. But the idea of it is hardly new. Universes running side by side have existed since human beings first began telling stories. The lokas of Hinduism and Buddhism, the nine worlds of Norse myth, Jannah and Jahannam in Islam and Heaven and Hell in Christianity, are all about worlds existing in parallel.
The current version of the multiverse came into its own in 20th century speculative fiction, when a middle-aged journalist named Barnstaple went on a motor holiday and drove through a portal into a parallel world, in HG Wells’s 1923 novel, Men Like Gods.
Since then, there have been numerous multiverses.
Wonder Woman crossed over to another world in the 1953 comic Wonder Woman’s Invisible Twin, and met her equivalent, Tara Terruna. Gardner Fox and Carmine Infantino reintroduced the concept — and created Earth-two — in their seminal 1961 comic, Flash of Two Worlds. Over at Marvel Comics, in 1983, Alan Moore played with the idea of multiple universes in his Captain Britain stories in The Daredevils comic magazine.
Dungeons & Dragons’s city of Sigil, the city of doors, plays a similar role in tabletop gaming. Here, anything can be a portal to another world: a scrap of music, a memory, a disused archway, even a curse from its enigmatic ruler, the Lady of Pain. There are multiverses in any number of animated shows, from Ben 10 to Rick and Morty.
There are the versions of multiple universes colliding so beloved of fan-fiction writers — where Doctor Who could go adventuring with Sherlock Holmes and meet the Winchester brothers from Supernatural. Or Aang from Avatar the Last Airbender could meet Harry Potter and teach him to use energybending.
In his Dark Tower series of novels, Stephen King’s multiple worlds are centered on the titular structure, the one fixed point in all these worlds. In the first novel of the series, …The Gunslinger, a character talks about the nature of his universe — and, who knows, the nature of ours as well: “If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through that shell, what great and torrential light might shine through your hole at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?”
The theory of everything
But it’s not just speculative fantasists who have been fascinated by the idea of the multiverse. The 5th-century-bce Greek philosopher Anaxagoras wondered if, just as there was a world for us, complete with cities and people and a sun and a moon, there were worlds for others. The 4th-century-bce philosopher Chrysippus thought that the universe was destroyed and recreated all the time, a concept that the author Terry Pratchett had a lot of fun with in his Discworld books.
Among other things, Pratchett used a concept called Trousers of Time, a riff on an episode from an old BBC radio comedy series. The series was called I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again; the episode, Professor Prune and The Electric Time Trousers. The Trousers of Time in Pratchett’s world are what are used, knowingly or unknowingly, whenever a choice is made. Each choice is a trouser leg, and in one novel, a character who makes a certain choice is given insight into what his life would have been like if he had picked the other one.
The Trousers of Time — the idea of one entrance and multiple exits — is the Discworld version of a serious and hotly debated theory of the multiverse, which began as a drunken idea. One evening in 1954, at Princeton University, the physics students Aage Petersen (an assistant to Niels Bohr), Charles Misner and Hugh Everett III, after some heavy sherry drinking, started discussing the paradoxes of quantum physics.
During the discussion, Everett, a voracious reader of science-fiction, came up with an idea that seemed to resolve a number of these issues; he posited that quantum effects cause the universe to constantly split. This became the basis of his PHD thesis, On the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. The original dissertation was so dense that John Wheeler, his advisor, worked with Everett to make it more digestible.
Wheeler, a distinguished physicist who had coined the terms “quantum foam” and “worm hole” and a man Stephen Hawking called “the hero of the black hole story”, wrote that he “found (Everett’s) draft barely comprehensible. I knew that if I had that much trouble with it, other faculty members on his committee would have even more trouble.”
In simple terms, if we take the case of another famous thought experiment in quantum mechanics, Schrodinger’s cat could be alive or dead in its box. When the box is opened, the universe where the cat is dead splits from the one where the cat is alive. So, the universe of the unopened box has split into two, once the result is observed, and the observer in one universe has no awareness of the other universe created by the choice.
Everett was a fascinating character, a brilliant physicist who left academia, possibly following disappointment with the way his ideas were received — there was very little interest in his theories of quantum universes — and went on to work with the US Department of Defense on, among other things, the principle of mutual assured destruction after a nuclear war, and the application of game theory to the analysis of ballistic missile performance.
A committed atheist, he had asked that his ashes be disposed of in the trash. After he died of a heart attack at 51, in 1982, his wife kept his ashes in an urn for a few years, before complying with his wishes. In 1996, his daughter Elizabeth Everett, 39, died by suicide, saying in her final note that she wished her ashes to be thrown out as well, so she could “end up in the correct parallel universe” and meet her father again.
That poignant note may represent the core of the multiverse’s appeal. What if there is another universe where the ones we lost are still alive? What if there is a world where we said “No” instead of “Yes”? Took that chance? Made a different choice? Were wealthier, more successful, or happier?
What if?
UNIVERSES RUNNING SIDE BY SIDE HAVE EXISTED SINCE HUMAN BEINGS FIRST BEGAN TELLING STORIES. THE LOKAS OF HINDUISM AND BUDDHISM, THE NINE WORLDS OF NORSE MYTH, JANNAH AND JAHANNAM IN ISLAM AND HEAVEN AND HELL IN CHRISTIANITY, ARE ALL ABOUT WORLDS EXISTING IN PARALLEL.
1962
Madeline L’engle’s A Wrinkle in Time gives young-adults a complex theoretical-science story wrapped in a fantasy adventure. Two kids and their friend embark on a journey through multiple galaxies in search of the siblings’ astrophysicist father. They meet supernatural beings, fight a sinister, dark cloud that threatens to intrude into every world. There’s a Mrs Who, a Mrs Which, a Mrs Whatsit. The classic was made into a film (above) in 2018, starring Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and Mindy Kaling.
1963
British writer Michael Moorcock brings the term ‘multiverse’ into popular culture through his novel, The Sundered Worlds. Set in a post-world War III context, it follows the tale of a nobleman who enters a mysterious galaxy, where he uncovers the secrets of interconnected alternate realities. The author also created the graphic novel Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse (1997) in which independent plots across locations and timelines converged into a single narrative.
1967
TV audiences get acquainted with the idea of a mirror universe via an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series. Captain Kirk and his crew land on an Earthlike planet in a darker parallel universe run by their barbaric dopplegangers, and must defeat them to get back to their reality.
1970
British science fiction television series, Doctor Who, weaves in multiple alternate timelines and universes, winning over critics and fans in the process. The Inferno, in season 7, is one of the first shows to depict the protagonist in an alternate world. Here, the Third Doctor transports himself into a fascist universe where a drilling project penetrating Earth has catastrophic effects.
1984
Scientist, neurosurgeon, pilot and rockstar Dr Buckaroo Banzai finds himself fighting interdimensional aliens called Red Lectroids in the film Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. It’s an oddly satisfying genre-bending adventure, garnering much of its loyal fan base in the years after its release. The story is quirky, the dialogues tongue-in-cheek. The idea that humans can save the world (and all the parallel ones) is now firmly part of pop culture.
1991
Players can jump across dimensions into new universes in video games too. The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past, builds alternate realms into its gameplay. Players can move between the Light World and the Dark World using portals.
1993
Everyone’s favourite Italian plumber joins the multiverse-hopping trend. Super Mario Bros, the film based on the Nintendo videogame series, is, by many accounts, a remarkably bad movie. But it weaves in alternate dimensions such as Dinohattan, inhabited by humanoids that have evolved from dinosaurs. A princess is being held captive there. The two Mario brothers set out to rescue her and save mankind from the evil dinosaur-descendant king Koopa.
1995
Science boosts science fiction. The TV series Sliders follows a group of travellers using a wormhole to slide into several parallel universes. Among their many adventures, they travel through an ice age where there are no other forms of life, visit a reality where penicillin was never discovered, and a dimension where time flows in reverse.
1998
Multiverses are not just for sci-fi but romantic dramas too. The film, Sliding Doors, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and John Hannah, showcases two parallel stories depending on the choices the female protagonist makes: like getting on a train or missing it. In later years, films like Mr Nobody (2009) used the same concept to follow Earth’s last mortal in a world where humanity has overcome death.
2001
The sci-fi action movie, The One, starring Jet Li has the protagonist exploring a set of complex, alternate realities to destroy 124 different versions of himself to become an all-powerful being. The pursuit of his other selves turns into a battle between good and evil, forcing him to introspect.
2007
Even geometry is involved. Flatland, based on the 1884 novella by mathematician Edwin Abbott Abbott, is a film about a titular two-dimensional world populated by circles, squares, triangles and other basic shapes, alarmed by the appearance of a sphere from a three-dimensional world. The film throws in revelations on dimensionality and infinity with the existence of other worlds like Lineland, Spaceland and Portland.
2013
The sci-fi comedy series Rick and Morty follows a crazy scientist and his grandson as they travel through bizarre alternate realities via a portal gun. There are post-apocalyptic wastelands, a world of sentient toilets, a dimension where pizzas eat people, a universe made up of giant butts, and one where nobody wears pants. Earth seems just as crazy.
2018
Here come the blockbusters. Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse follows Miles Morales, Marvel’s Spider-man in a universe much like our own. The villain Kingpin can open portals to multiple universes. Naturally, Morales must team up with his alternate-reality counterparts Spider-woman, Noir Spider-man and Spider-ham (a pig) to fight him.
2021
Spider-man: No Way Home becomes the first superhero blockbuster to use the multiverse as an integral part of its plotline. Spider-man seeks help from Dr. Strange, which opens up a portal for all the villains and heroes from every Spider-man live-action film since 2002 to come crashing through. The show What If…? (2021) reimagines integral moments from the MCU, set in alternate realities, while the TV series Loki (2021), takes the Marvel mischief-maker across realms where he meets different versions of himself.
2022
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness introduces America Chavez, who punches star-shaped portals into multiple realities to travel through them and meet other Marvel characters. Outside of the MCU, In Everything Everywhere All At Once, a woman braves through alternate versions of her life to save her relationships, heal from generational trauma and save the multiverse. For videogame players, the team-based Multiversus (above) features characters from Warner Bros., DC Comics, HBO, Turner Entertainment, and Cartoon Network coming together and using their powers to defeat their opponents.
2023 and beyond
In the works are films and shows from the MCU collectively called the Multiverse Saga. Expect Ant-man And The Wasp: Quantumania, Secret Invasion, The Marvels and two Avengers films, …The Kang Dynasty and …Secret Wars. A second season of What If…? and a sequel of Spider-man: Across the Spider-verse is also on the cards.