Ode to Verses

(Second of three parts)

So how did the theories on many universes come about? If you have been to the city of Olinda, you would have a better shot at understanding how one theory, among a few, could imagine many universes. Olinda is only arrived at when you search for that point in the city just about the size of a pin. With a magnifying glass, you find settled on the pin, neighborhoods, gardens and antenna, even horse-race tracks, but when you visit the same pin’s point later, it would have already grown to a larger point cradling larger neighborhoods, plazas and skylights until it is a full-blown city blooming from and pressing on the existing city where you found that very dense point. The Inflation Theory is something like Olinda. Dr. Alan Guth, who introduced the theory, now with others like Dr. Andre Linde, Dr. Alexander Vilenkin and Dr. Paul Steinhardt, believe that when the universe was about a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old, there was an incredible amount of energy that burst forth in all directions and that if from such an ounce of that fireball, the universe that we know now has sprung, then there must be other universes from that stuff and the process could be endless. Hey, why not? It’s free.

To help us imagine the workings of another theory that brings forth the possibility of other universes, we look at Eufemia. Now, Eufemia is not for the traditional or the faint-hearted bargain-hunter. Each solstice and equinox, people from all over come to Eufemia to trade memories, making them forget and remember at the same time. It is like a black hole where words become so dense with the memories associated with them, that they disappear from the original maker of the memory and are passed on to others who take them to other places. So if I go to Eufemia, my memory of my encounters with a beloved or the sea will be traded with someone else’s memory of their beloved or their sea. And that is what I carry with me after I go to Eufemia. Dr. Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario thinks that, indeed, universes can be reproduced through black holes, those pits in the universe that are so dense that even light cannot escape from them.

Another city, Perenthia, foreshadows in part the next theory on multi-verse. Perenthia has mapped the destinies of its inhabitants and their fixtures according to the measurements that correspond to the distances of stars and other hovering stuff in the firmament. However, when it did this, irregularities and deformities in bodies and places occurred and now, the astronomers of Perenthia are torn between adjusting their figures and admitting that those are the forms that the heavens really dictate. Sans the ethically charged commotion of Perenthian astronomers, this next theory on multi-verse started out in a similar way with scientists trying to map and locate a particle. Physicists Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg pretty much gave the quantum theory its language, saying that an electron is neither here nor there but rather is spread out, expressed in terms of probabilities, and that at the very instance one measures it, it collapses into a point that we can observe. Dr. Hugh Everett III and Dr. John Wheeler extended this principle but instead of the point "collapsing," they imagined the universe splitting into several, with each universe as a stage for each and every possibility there is. According to this theory then, one never really mutates her array of life choices because they are all lived in each of their corresponding universe, except that one would never know of the others.

Another theory that has caused a stir more recently has been that put forward by Dr. John Schwarz of Caltech. It offers the theory that the most elementary particles such as quarks (which make up protons, neutrons, mesons) and leptons (electrons and neutrinos) are not really made up of points but rather vibrations of minute strings. Now, in order to explain particles and particle interactions, these vibrations would have to occur not only in four dimensions but that in as many as 10 or even 11 dimensions! Schwarz raised this Super String Theory in 1984 but only fairly recently has it gotten the serious attention of mainstream physics. Now, with Dr. Edward Witten of Princeton who put forth the M Theory in 1995, which incorporates several String theories, it has raised the temperatures of academia physica a couple of notches. This M Theory presupposes that each thing that exists corresponds to a unique harmony produced by the strings. If this happens, the String Theory also hopes to be able to unify the four fundamental forces of nature: weak, strong, electromagnetic and gravity. "Fundamental" because these things are given. Nothing beyond those forces could account for them. They work fine and the natural world could count on them but only in their given scales: the weak and the strong forces working well in the subatomic level, while the electromagnetic and the gravitational forces for things bigger than that.

Marco Polo also saw some strange strings in his travels. Stringy Ersilia hangs and weaves itself into the imperial conversation with the Ersilians stretching color-coded strings from one place or another to form the web that dyes their relations in blood, authority, trade or agency. When the labyrinth becomes too cumbersome, the Ersilians pack up and leave only the webs they formed and then they move on to weave more string ensembles. Now, at this point, you really wonder whether Calvino got the Nobel for Literature or Physics.