Everything Everywhere All at Once recently swept the Oscars, with an astounding total of seven wins in categories from Best Picture to three Best Performances. Part of the reason might have been its sheer novelty; it reimagined the tired multiverse trope with an out-of-the-box creativity often lacking in big-budget sci-fi films.
Through the main character Evelyn Wang, the audience explores a dazzling multitude of universes—where humans have sausage fingers, piñatas are sentient, and life never existed. But is the film really accurate? Do parallel universes exist? And if so, could we tap into them to embody our alternate selves and gain some gnarly Kung Fu moves?
What is a "multiverse"?
It's a concept that spins off the idea of a universe (one world). Simply put, the multiversal theory suggests that multiple universes coexist. According to NewScientist, the theory was developed by Princeton graduate student Hugh Everett. He believed there were an infinite amount of universes within a grander multiverse, containing parallel instances of everything - including us.
Models of the multiverse
Among many others, there are currently two popular theories modeling the multiverse:
1. The braneworld
In this theory, the "universe" that we know floats in higher-dimensional space, along with many other branes that contain separate universes. We cannot move in the direction of the higher spatial dimensions, but they do exist.
Imagine many 2D worlds stacked in a 3D space. The 2D beings wouldn't be able to escape their dimension, but we - 3D beings - would observe that there is a higher-dimensional space that contains their worlds.
2. Multiverse from inflation
Inflation refers to the rapid expansion of space moments after the Big Bang. Studies hypothesize that there were misalignments between parts of the universe when inflation began and ended. This shift spawned more universes from the "parent" universe, which in turn spawned further grandchild universes, and so on (Fukuda, 2017).
According to Prof. Junichi Yokoyama of the University of Tokyo, once inflation begins, it continues indefinitely in some regions where it occurred. So, although inflation has ended in our universe, it's possible that it is still continuing beyond our world and is creating more universes.
This might be more in line with what Everything Everywhere suggests, where every decision and action creates a parallel universe.
Jobu: "Every new discovery is just a reminder..." Evelyn: "We're all small and stupid."
Ultimately, these are all just theories that speculate what the world around us looks like. There haven't been any direct observations yet that support any of these theories.
NASA's LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) observatory detects gravitational waves from supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the cores of galaxies. Because SMBHs are so massive, the collisions distort spacetime in gravitational waves (LISA - Laser Interferometer Space Antenna -NASA Home Page, 2023). The hope is that these observations shed more light on the inflation theory and thus the potential for a multiverse.
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Works about multiverses/parallel universes:
Coraline
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Yesterday
Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Works Cited
Hooper, R. (2014, September 24). Hugh Everett: The man who gave us the multiverse. New Scientist; New Scientist. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26261-hugh-everett-the-man-who-gave-us-the-multiverse/
Fukuda, I. (2017, October 26). Multiverse Theory: The Infinite Worlds Birthed by Inflation. Newton, Newton Special(1).
Abdulbaki, M. (2022, April 7). Everything Everywhere All At Once Multiverse Explained. ScreenRant; Screen Rant. https://screenrant.com/everything-everywhere-all-at-once-multiverse-explained/
LISA - Laser Interferometer Space Antenna -NASA Home Page. (2023). Nasa.gov. https://lisa.nasa.gov
Moskowitz, C. (2014, March 31). Multiverse Controversy Heats Up over Gravitational Waves. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/multiverse-controversy-inflation-gravitational-waves/
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