Multiverse

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Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein

—Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse

For this is the beauty of the Multiverse:

In an alternative universe, it is always Saturday. All your loved ones will be there. Not only will they all be there, but they’ll all be somehow better. They’ll like your jokes more. They’ll think you’re really important, but that will simply be reflecting the overwhelming groundswell of opinion on the planet that you, personally, have been misunderstood and under-appreciated, and which is fixated on putting that right.

I tell myself this every evening as I cry myself to sleep. I write it in postcards to my dear grandmother, though she is now passed on, and I still address them as I did as a lad:

Grandma Contrarian,
24 Argumentative Road
Whingeing
Essex EX4 5FU
England
United Kingdom
The World,
The Solar System,
The Western Arm, Milky Way
The Local Group,
The Virgo Supercluster,
The Pisces–Cetus Supercluster Complex,
The Observable Universe,
The Whole Universe including the unseen bits including all forms of Dark Matter and/or Dark Energy,
The Multiverse

But here’s the logical impossibility: does it just stop at the Multiverse? If so, how to you know? Is that really plausible? Wouldn’t all those bubbles of cosmological froth be inside yet another bubble, colossal in this world yet infinitesimal in the next, just a pale blue dot in its own stupendous sea of infinitesimal bubbles?

Grandma, are you listening? Are you there?

See also

• Occam’s razor
• Voltaire’s maxim
• Every dog has its day