I find Multiverse theory to be aesthetically pleasing as well as quite compatible with many other disputed theories. My particular favourite flavour of Multiverse is also fun for its sheer ungraspability. Everything that could possibly happen does, each branching into a new universe (or a new 'verse', I suppose). Each infinitesimal fraction of a second, there's near enough an infinite number of possible things that could happen (which way is that electron going to vibrate?). Picture a multiverse branching so many times. Not easy.

The thing I like most about such a system is that both predetermination and free will are fully functional. The whole incomprehensible infinite-squared thing (mathematicians say that there's a difference between infinity and infinity-squared) is predetermined. Nothing you do can make another possibility possible. But which 'verse' your consciousness follows is free will.

This works with Quantum Mechanics and the 'everything affects everything else' theory. For Quantum Mechanics I shall use the old favourite, much misquoted, and entirely unserious Schroedinger's Cat example, which states approximately:
"Shut a cat in a box with a poison capsule which has a fifty percent chance of releasing its poison (using the decay of a radioactive isotope for the 'random' factor). The cat enters a quantum state in which it is 'both alive and dead'. When the box is opened and the cat observed, the state collapses into one of the two possibilities."
Attaching that to my Multiverse theory, the cat is always both alive and dead. The opening of the box is the point at which it is decided which of the 'verses' your perception has followed. Whether you've followed a branch before the box is opened is debatable, much in the same way as Schroedinger's example is often debated.

This multiverse, then, is already mind-bogglingly huge (and some people have trouble with the concept of the size of a mere universe). Think, then, consider that time since 'The Big Bang' (Cross reference : creation) mightn't be the start of the multiverse, but merely a branch, relatively tiny given that there's a similar sized branch a fraction of a second earlier, one later, ad infinitum.

Does magic work in the multiverse? Are horoscopes true? Of course. Also no. If your perception decides to follow one of the routes described by your horoscope then it's (to you) true. Perhaps your perception might decide to follow a route where your horoscope is true for a whole twelfth of the population. The same goes for magic. You perform some psychic act and bend a spoon. Well done, you've entered a 'verse' where the spoon bends. All the sceptics watching probably took a different branch (at least those consciousnesses which wanted to carry on not believing).

In terms of dimensions, this huge hypothetical thing requires only five. The three we perceive ordinarily, time (which some consider to be a fourth already, some argue otherwise), and a fifth, 'branch'. Of course, branching might work in more than one dimension, much as movement.

Time travel (Cross reference : time) is also quite compatible with the multiverse. Going back twenty minutes, you bump into yourself. It's one of you who followed a branch in which they meet themselves coming back in time. You might or might not have met yourself at that time, depends which branch you were in. Then you can 'change the future', except you don't, you merely take a peek at a different one. You kill your father, depriving a branch of yourself (except, of course, it was already without yourself, because you do go back in time and kill your father, somebranch).

I'd better stop now before I go any further in trying to describe a five-dimensional shape. My own mind likes the shape. It's pretty.

[ Think back... ]

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