There's no proof of the multiverse, but has someone made the journey to another dimension already?
Indeed, are there rubbing points that would enable you to slip from
this universe into another? In the multiverse theory, as we have seen, there
are “bubbles” of many, even trillions of universes out there. If those
universes were to touch one another, the way that soap bubbles can cling to one
another, would it be possible to slip through the membrane of our dimension,
into that of an adjacent one?
Research is now turning to this topic. And while there is
absolutely no empirical evidence that alternate universes exist, there has been
plenty of theoretical work done on the matter. Numerous celebrated physicists
such as have argued that as space expands cosmic-scale energy sparks and
creates vast amounts of matter, which we term a universe. Elsewhere in space
other energy discharges spark more universes. Alex Vilenken, of Tufts
University, theorized that the seminal Big Bang was not the first such event in
cosmic existence, that there have been countless others before.
But because space is constantly expanding, there is no way
to bridge the distances between universeses. Light can’t reach us from these
vast distances. Physicist Steven Weinberg
of the University of Texas at Austin counters that because you can’t see the
other parts of the multiverse, how can you be confident it exists?
Yes, science needs to observe to prove, and so far we can
observe. However, there is a tiny, fascinating document that was discovered in
the 1960s that gives a tantalizing vision. Written by the putative Professor
François Marceau, an ethnographer of the 1930s with l’Institute Française Impériale de l’Extrême-Orient, a learned
treatise discusses possible “rubbing points” that have enabled men to
cross into an alternate reality.
It was immediately dismissed as fiction—a response that I,
as a novel, take umbrage with—and that it had been concocted. Yet much of the theoretical
foundations for “Professor Marceau” was not even determined until the 1990s and
even later. How could his treatise, which is addressed to the “French imperial
authorities in Calcutta,” discuss in detail the multiverse and its
characteristics decades before the world’s leading physicists began positing
the phenomenon? One might argue that the author had extrapolated Einstein’s
thinking to come up with the multiverse. But even so, it is a terrific feat of
imagination, whether it is fiction or not.
One last thing: There were no “French imperial authorities
in Calcutta.” During the 1930s Britain would have been the imperial authority
in Calcutta. Was Professor Marceau a visitor from another universe?