THE SOUTHWORTH PLANETARIUM
70 Falmouth Street Portland, Maine 04103
(207) 780-4249 usm.maine.edu/planet
43.6667° N 70.2667° W
Altitude: 10 feet below sea level
Founded January 1970
2021-2022: XCVIII
"I'm not strange, weird, off nor crazy. my reality is just different from yours." -Lewis Carroll
THE DAILY ASTRONOMER
Monday, March 28, 2022
A Bishop on Boardwalk
A despairing shout emanated from the darkness in the star dome: "I want to go into a parallel Universe where there isn't any homework!"
Titters rippled through the audience before the teacher testily reminded students that I had asked for questions, not editorial comments. I dispelled the ensuing and oppressive silence with the "Bishop on Boardwalk." No, not a tale about a church official perambulating along a promenade. An analogy about parallel Universes.
The problem is that we humans are spatial and temporal beings. Since we regard all destinations as being coordinates along the space-time matrix, our notion of moving from one situation to another is perceived as a spatial and temporal event. For instance, "Mr Spock is going to mosey on down to the little cow poke's room after 112,345,984,498 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the hyperfine levels of the unperturbed ground state of the Cesium-133 atom."
Shifting between alternative realities is not quite as straight forward.
"Imagine a bishop on boardwalk," I explained to the darkness, which responded with a perplexed grimace. "By which I mean, placing a bishop on Boardwalk, as opposed to Park Place." The darkness then smiled a bit and nodded knowingly. "What would happen? Bishops can only move diagonally." The darkness scratched its head and looked up hopelessly at the dome.
Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200
"You see, the situation is impossible. It doesn't translate. Yes, one can place a bishop on a Monopoly board. However, the bishop cannot actually participate in the game. It can be used as a piece just like the race car -my favorite- or the ironing board. However, if used in this capacity, it will cease to actually be a bishop in the conventional sense. Understand."
The darkness became so frustrated it left the dome. As the students were now able to see me, I went to the chalkboard and drew two squares, or, actually, two pathetic attempts at squares, separated by two feet.
"Here is the chess board and here the Monopoly Board." They are distinct Universes inaccessible to each other by any means. We could put one board on top of another, of course, but the laws governing each game cannot be combined."
Parallel Universes, if they even exist, would be wholly different from our own. They wouldn't be subject to the same physical laws which prevail in this cosmos. Moreover, we know of no spatial corridors that connect them.* The student desperately seeking to avoid homework wouldn't be able to just skip off into another Universe.
The notion of parallel Universes came into scientific vogue largely because the Universe seems so precisely designed to produce life. For instance, tweak gravity slightly and the Universe would have either imploded soon after its inception or the matter within it would never have coalesced to form stars, planets or galaxies in the first place. The notion of one universe perfectly crafted to generate life causes some scientists an immense amount of discomfort. However, if billions of Universes exist, then life just happens to arise in those Universes that are suitable for its development.
Our Universe could be just a bubble in a vast sea.
We don't yet know how to discover these other bubbles, or even how to access them, which might be impossible. The bishop cannot pass Go.
*Black holes are often regarded as serving as such conduits. Actually, Einstein-Rosen Bridges, which are believed to be attached to them, could be passageways to other Universes. However, these "bridges" are likely so unstable that they'd collapse whenever something enters them. Also, the extreme tidal forces associated with black holes would literally reduce any traveler to his/her subatomic particles long before they reached it.
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