World within Worlds

Submitted by:

Ankit Mahato (A6429713003)

World, as we know is a big place to live in. We create our own worlds. Sometimes we consider it strange, new, introvert or arrogant but still we live in this world inculcating a new beginning every day. Every day in this Pale Blue Dot.

According to the words of Carl Sagan, “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religion, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived here – on a mole of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

This image is taken from Voyager I spacecraft in 1990 when it reached the edge of solar system.

It shows our position in the solar system. How small we really are in this vast universe. How frequent there are misunderstandings, how eager we are to kill one another, how fervent our hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those general and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of the dot. We imagine of our self-importance and consider we have a special position in our universe. But all that we believe are challenged by this point of pale light.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. There are possibilities of worlds lying beyond the one we know. There was a time when “universe” meant “all there is”. It means everything. The notion of more than one universe, more than one everything, would be a contradiction in terms. Sometimes “universe” still connotes absolutely everything. Sometime it refers only to those parts of everything that someone such as you or I could have access to. Perhaps someday our understanding of multiple universes will mature sufficiently for us. What’s at the heart of the heart of the subject is weather there exist realms that challenge convention by suggesting that what we have long thought to be the universe is only one component of a far greater, perhaps far stranger and mostly hidden reality.

A striking fact is that many of the major developments in fundamental theoretical physics have led us to consider one or another variety of parallel universe. In some, the parallel universes are separated from us by enormous stretches of space and time, in others, they are hovering millimeters away, in others, and the very notion of their location proves parochial devoid of meaning. A similar range of possibility is manifest in the laws governing the parallel universes. In some, the laws are the same as in ours, in others; they appear different but have a shared heritage, in others still the law is of a form and structure unlike anything we have ever encountered. It’s at once humbling and stirring to imagine just how expansive reality may be.

The early vision of parallel universes resonates with the idea of separate lands or alternative histories that were being explored in literature, television ad film. They include The Wizard of Oz, Its Wonderful Life, Star Trek, Donnie Darko, and Borges story “The garden of Forking paths”.

World within worlds shares the possibility of everything that we have ever imagined. May be you are right in your imagination. Don’t just stop imagining because you never know what all secrets you are going to unlock.