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Articles

The Multiverse Conundrum

Tim Wilkinson on the physics & philosophy of parallel universes.

In his 1895 essay Is Life Worth Living? the American philosopher William James wrote, “Truly, all we know of good and duty proceeds from nature… [which] is all plasticity and indifference – a moral multiverse, as one might call it” and a new word was born. A century later, and James’s neologism has been commandeered by physicists and pressed into service in a somewhat different context. These days ‘multiverse’ refers to the literal existence of multiple universes. But is such a thing even possible?

Aristotle thought the existence of multiple worlds, let alone universes, would be an absurdity; but by medieval times, philosopher-theologians including al-Ghazali in the East and John Duns Scotus in the West were already questioning whether God had created the best of all possible worlds – and thus acknowledging that He could have created others. In 1277 the Bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier, issued a series of famous condemnations of all sorts of theological and philosophical propositions, and saw fit to explicitly denounce Aristotle’s view of there being only one possible world, which he thought to be at odds with God’s omnipotence.

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