I’ve got nothing. Well, not quite nothing, because this post exists.
I was going to write about this extremely click-baity article, in which researchers at the Large Hadron Collider talk about how they’re searching for mini black holes, which will allow us to make contact with parallel universes. Turns out, the article is a copy of one that appeared in 2016.
I was very disappointed by this, thinking that I shouldn’t pay it any more mind, on principle. (And I still don’t like auto-generated stuff, so I encourage you to not click that link; I just included it for the sake of completeness.) But then I started thinking. The original article appears to have been from 2016. How many of us have spent the past year talking about how 2020 is insane? How many of us have traced that back to events of 2016 (specifically, a certain American national election)?
Does is seem like the stability of reality is increasing? Not to me- which might explain why I’m having so much trouble writing. I feel like I’m in a holding pattern, just waiting for the first week of November. Once I’m done with this post, I’m cruising over to the ‘Zon to look for a folding treadmill (today is Prime Day in the US). My DH is preparing to hunker down and literally not leave the house the week of the election. I’ve been dutifully collecting the things we need to make that a reality, but if I have to stay inside for a full week, without any means of exercising, I’m going to go spare.
But let’s go back to parallel universes. I understood about every other word of that article, because I don’t know anything about physics, astronomy, or- some would argue- the nature of reality. What I got out of it is that the researchers rev up the Collider with some insane amount of power, and this is supposed to cause tiny black holes to appear, which could lead to parallel universes. One person theorized that bits of universes could start leaking back and forth, including things like gravity, which I would think is a concept that should stay firmly where it’s planted.
If have no idea if any of this is accurate or even plausible. But it would certainly explain the last few years, and why increasing numbers of people are scratching their heads and wondering if we’re living in a Babylon Bee article.
Sound off in the comments- do you think parallel universes exist? Are mini black holes a reasonable way to contact them? How much resemblance would a parallel universe bear to our own? And so on. Try to avoid politics; this is a nice blog.
*cover image is not mine, and was looted from the FB group Medieval Merriment, because my Swedish heritage requires me to go a-viking occasionally.
Mad Genius Club 
I don’t believe in parallel worlds– maybe some sort of a loop world, which might work for time travel (basically, yes it all happens and the thread of time circles, with those involved sort of jumping the chain of events) but not truly parallel worlds. It “feels” like one of those things imagined because a philosophical conclusion required it.
i dunno if i believe in them or not, the mathematical proofs for it are way beyond me. it is a neat concept, tho…
I think there are parallel worlds but we don’t need miniature black holes to access them. That is a >terrible< idea; think of what could go wrong.
We access parallel worlds in our dreams.
I've had vivid, vivid dreams where I am not myself and I don't know anyone around me. The sensation is very clearly one of riding around in someone else's head and experiencing, at one remove, what they are experiencing. I cannot control the action. I can only go along for the ride.
Writing leads to parallel worlds because we can taste someone else's thoughts.
Yes. For perhaps 25 years (starting when I was a little kid) I had three consecutive nights of dreams in some “parallel universe” every month or so, regular as clockwork for 3 or 4 months, then a long gap, then another 3 or 4 months, etc. Always riding in the same persons head, and commonly with the same associates (I could hear my host’s thoughts, sometimes, but awareness was not mutual). Got to where I knew the map and many details (overlapped 1960s America, but lots of things were different, frex Mexico was part of the U.S., and Denver was where L.A. is). But it was immersive, so I had to figure everything out for myself. And things would change (sometimes disconcertingly so) between sessions. Roads and houses got built over wilderness, that sort of thing.
However, something had gone awry in that universe some time before, and as long as I knew the place my host was on the run from “the Inspector” (government enforcer, I was never clear on exactly what or why). And eventually our little group got cornered. And my host jumped into a lake to escape, and apparently drowned.
Which threw me violently out of the dream, and I’ve never been there again.
So, do our brains leak across when they’re not fully under our control? might explain some forms of hallucinating psychosis. Certainly explains these weird cyclic dreams, and how mine ended.
Denver was by the sea? I THINK I KNOW THAT PLACE!
It also wasn’t much of a town. The whole southwestern region was desolate — “Denver” was little more than a few fishing wharfs. Most of civilization, far as I saw, was in the swath that’s SLC in the here-and-now, bounded by Montana and Minnesota on the north. Idaho and the Dakotas were nowhere to be found. My job there apparently was long-distance mail carrier, serving that area.
Thus proving that you don’t die if you dream you die!
Apparently not… well, at least not if you’re in someone else’s head! tho I can attest that it was rather a shock. Woke me up hard.
This is remarkable. I think you did tap into someplace else. While I ride along, it never seems to repeat like your experience.
Yeah, it was too consistent and too regular to dismiss as mere repeating dreams. Not to mention how it came to an abrupt halt.
I’ve always considered parallel universes as more of a way for theoretical physicists to ‘carry the one’ in some of the weirder quantum equations than something that actually exists. However, the concept of parallel universes is just so good as a plot device that it has widely become accepted in fiction, even to the point where people are trying to prove they exist in the real world.
I believe in many worlds but not in parallel ones. Like Narnia, for instance, in The Magician’s Nephew there is the wood between world and the are many worlds but Narnia and Charn aren’t parallel worlds of Earth.
Imagine if there’s a parallel Earth where 2020 is the most boring year ever.
Are they accepting immigration?
I’d be a tad worried about why they considered it boring.
I mean, what if it were still what we would consider worse, it was just quieter than normal by their standards?
Unless I’m wrong this article is highly misleading: these aren’t parallel universes; this is an attempt to determine the number of dimensions in our universe as theorized by string theory or mbrane theory.
Obviously I love the concept of Parallel Worlds, except mine are “formerly congruent, split, and now not parallel, each heading off in different directions.”
But it is a concept I play with, not real.
There might be something extra-dimensional. I’m not a physicist, so I won’t pretend to be an expert, let alone a cutting edge researcher.
In real life? There are a surprisingly large number of problems that you can handle fine without paying attention to cutting edge physics, or even modern physics. Physics is worth studying if it lets you solve a problem you want to solve.
If a parallel world, or a black hole, or whatever is not a measurable result that would obviously be created from an immediately realizable device, then it can be safely ignored by most people. Actual booms from scaled down prototypes are interesting. If you need a physicist, and a bunch of theoretical lecture to tell it from noise, it might not be relevant. Feeding a journalist a paper will produce a useless statement, regardless of whether the paper is boring, pointless, interesting, or important. Physics professors can possibly explain fancy stuff to freshmen; journalist are generally far beyond professorial powers of clarification.
In fiction? I figure it is fine to take liberties. If you take your manuscript into an academic department, and get run out of town on a rail, you’ve done nothing wrong.
Setting for WIP has parallel Earths, and alternate timelines. Also, clashing between divination superpowers that do not function identically. Most of that is the background, and I’m not sure how much of it I’m going to need to write around, in order for the plot to be comprehensible.
I’ve been having a lot of fun with the 28 dimensions of reality in my books. If you add dimensions to our normal 3 (plus time, of course) you can start to account for things like entanglement.
Entanglement is a condition where one particle’s spin is “attached” in some way to an other particle. If you change the spin of the first with an MRI machine for example, the spin of the second particle also changes. It doesn’t matter how far away the second particle is. Across a chip, across a room or in orbit, it still does it.
My contribution to rubber science was to say that the particles are still touching in one of the 28 dimensions. That dimension has no physical distances in it, so all the particles in the universe are all there and all touching at the same time. That’s why it doesn’t matter how far apart the particles are, they still touch in Dimension X.
This also allows there to be more than one plane of existence. You can have physical universes of three space and one time dimension separated from each other by “distance” in a fifth or sixth dimension. Like 2D sheets of paper in a stack, separated by the third dimension. Except 4D version.
You can also have places that exist in a “lower” or “higher” state of being by saying that our three spatial and one temporal don’t start at One. Maybe they start up around Six. What would be below our physical universe? What would be above?
Could there be people with access to more dimensions than our usual three? Such a person would be able to know things and do things impossible for 3 dimensional creatures like us. Could there be people who lived above us?
What would happen if one of them dropped in to Earth? For a holiday?
I believe.
Actually, most of the time I don’t, but for “Parallel Worlds” (or the more widely applicable “Alternate Worlds”), I do, but mostly because I find it somewhat unlikely that there is just one, & not for any rational reason (though the idea that the “Dark” portions of reality are actually alternate expressions of what reality is does sort of resonate [no, I didn’t read the hyperlinked article or it’s source]).