Each of the stories featured herein is set within a Universe of the writer's creation, while all being a part of a larger, shared Multiverse.
At the Ooorah Mothership, we call this the M'Verse.
Writers have free rein to tell the story they want to t...
Happy New Year, everyone ❤️ With January on the roll, there's a lot to be grateful for. With a kaleidoscope of individualities, this is what we strive to be--the best version of ourselves 😄
This month's issue has multiverses spread across a plethora of universes. Something we all have fantasied or believed in once-upon-a-time. In my childhood, I remember looking at the stars and wondering and imagining if there were earths or lives or universes beyond where we live and feeling like just a speck in this overwhelmingly fascinating cosmos. Join me as we dive into the nitty-gritties of the diverse universes connected through each other across the infinitesimal multiverses.
The size of the universe is astonishing with a diameter of around 7 billion light-years and spans some 93 billion light-years across and contains everything we have ever known. There are planets, stars, galaxies, blackholes including space, energy and time.
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On the basis of some, the concept of innumerable co-existent worlds was initially suggested by the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaximander in the 6th century BC, followed by the Greek Atomists--Leucippus and Democritus in the 5th century BC, Epicurus (341-270 BCE) and Lucretius (1st century BC).
The philosopher Chrysippus in the 3rd century BC, theorized our world regenerated itself, which in turn, suggested the existence of multiple universes across time.
The term multiverse was first used in a different perspective by American philosopher and psychologist William James in 1895. In the same year, the theory first appeared in its original scientific viewpoint in the course of the discussion between Boltzmann and Zermelo.
Winston Churchill attested to the multiverse theory when explaining his preference for "believing whatever I want to believe" in his autobiography "My Early Life" in 1930.
In 1952 at a lecture in Dublin, Erwin Schrödinger warned his audience that his equations might seem a bit off. His duality of superposition described several different histories, that were not alternatives, but that happened simultaneously,--all at the same time.
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Over a period of time, physics community has contemplated the various multiverse theories. In 2007, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg suggested if the multiverse really existed, "the hope of finding a rational explanation for the precise values of quark masses and other constants of the standard model that we observe in our Big Bang is doomed, for their values would be an accident of the particular part of the multiverse in which we live."
The mysterious process of inflation and the Big Bang principles have convinced some researchers that multiple universes are highly possible. According to theoretical physicist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Massachusetts(2011), inflation didn't end everywhere at the same time. While it ended for everything from Earth 13.8 billion years ago, cosmic inflation continues in other places and is called the theory of eternal inflation. As inflation ends in a particular place, a new bubble universe forms.
Those bubble universes can't contact each other because they continue to expand indefinitely. If we were to set off for the edge of our bubble, where it might butt up against the next bubble universe over, we'd never reach it because the edge is zipping away from us faster than the speed of light, and faster than we could ever travel.
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Enough of the scifi facts, let's move onto the fiction side of things. Do you know the concept of multiple universes came into print as early as 1884 with Edwin A. Abbott's novella "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions".
The multiverse term was first used by DC in their comic book "Flash of Two Worlds" (Flash Volume 1 #123) in September 1961 by Carmine Infantino and Gardner Fox. In the story, Flash meets with his duplicate version of another Earth (Earth-2) and another Flash (Flash-2).
The word was used in its scientific context by Michael Moorcock in his 1963 SF Adventures novella The Sundered Worlds as a part of his Eternal Champion series.
Multiverses can still be seen in recent movies such as the 2016 Marvel film "Doctor Strange" and in the 2022 "Doctor Strange in Multiverse of Madness. An entire genre of Japanese graphic novels, called isekai, deals with characters transported to parallel worlds.
Almost every "Star Trek" series has incorporated some form of mirror universe and the 2009 reboot film starring Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto took subsequent "Star Trek" movies into an entirely new timeline that branches off from the original.
The DC and Marvel comics, along with their corresponding movies, explore the idea of parallel worlds into much depth. There's the DC's Flashpoint arc and 2018's "Into the Spider-Verse" all delve into multiple universes and the intersections between them.
To this list of movies, I'd like to add "The Chronicles of Narnia", "Morbius", "Coraline", "The Butterfly Effect", "Source Code", "Everything Everything All At Once."
Moving away from DC and Marvel, I'd like to recommend these:
- His Dark Materials" series by Phillip Pullman.
- The "Discworld" series by Terry Pratchett.
- Men Like Gods by H. G. Wells.
- The Dark Tower" series by Stephen King.
- A Thousand Pieces Of You by Claudia Gray.
- Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth.
- The Martian Viking by Tim Sullivan.
- Dark Matter BY Blake Crouch.
- The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E Harrow.
I'd like to know more about your preferred multiverse books in the inline comments.
This is all for now. I'll meet you soon, with another interestingly amazing sub-genre. Bye and take care ❤️
