The film “Everything Everywhere All At Once” won big at the Oscars this year, taking home seven awards, including best picture. The film’s main character slips into alternate realities. The idea for the plot is loosely based on a science-fiction concept called the “multiverse.” So, what is the multiverse exactly, and could it really exist?
It’s connected to cosmic inflation theory, which suggests that when the universe was created with the Big Bang, it expanded exponentially.
“Just imagine inflating a balloon,” said physics professor at Virginia Tech Djordje Minic. Imagine if that balloon keeps expanding, creating a whole series of universes. “So you have all these bubbles. And maybe in different bubbles there are different laws of physics,” Minic said.
Within this theory, our bubble universe just happens to be the perfect condition for our galaxy and planet, and life as we know it, to form. “So you have a goldilocks solution. It’s not too cold. It’s not too hot. It’s just right,” Minic said.
Minic grew up in Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists, and has decomposed due to war. War, Minic said, is what humans do when they are irrational.
“It’s a tragic thing. Humans on one side, when they are rational, they do amazing things, like they go to the moon, or invent many world interpretation of quantum theory.”
When Minic first came to the United States for graduate school in the 1980s, his home country Yugoslavia still existed. But he landed in what seemed an alternate reality, of sorts—Texas, where he suddenly needed his appendix removed at the hospital.
Being from a country that provided free health care, he was shocked to receive a massive bill for his emergency treatment.
He left the hospital and went to hear a talk by one of his mentors, physicist and Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg, who presented his theory of the multiverse — remember that ever-inflating balloon, and an endless number of possible universes?
“Everyone argues about this. Not everyone agrees on this,” Minic said.
He points out that there is no empirical evidence for quantum gravity, part of which is the concept of the multiverse, so these are very much unfounded theories.
“One thing that always disturbed me about this, like any other approach to quantum gravity, it’s not empirical. It’s very disturbing to a scientist.”
But could there one day be proof, evidence for quantum gravity, and even the multiverse?
"Finding empirical evidence for quantum gravity (something that I work on) would be
spectacular," Minic said. "Such a discovery would be huge — it would be as big as discoveries of Einstein’s general relativity and quantum theory combined."
In one of his books, “The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe,” Weinberg wrote, “The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”
“Tragic because we will never know everything,” Minic interprets this quote. “It’s also tragic because we don’t manage to educate everyone. Just imagine how much lost brain power there is in the world.” He points to all the women who, throughout history, were not allowed to go to school, and children across the globe who don’t have access to education.
Minic says human brains are capable of great things when they are given the opportunity. .
“It’s not about the discoverers,” Minic said. “It’s about the discovery. It’s about this larger world that’s out there. And we are just parts of it.”
These ideas aren’t just reserved for physicists. Minic said philosophers, artists, and filmmakers are thinking about this too.
So a few weeks ago, he and his wife went to see the film, “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once,” which revolves around a simple plot— a woman’s relationships with her daughter, husband, and father, are not going so well. Meanwhile, the woman, named Evelyn, is being audited by the IRS.
From there, things get weird. Alternate realities and parallel universes overlap and collide. Her husband suddenly changes, telling her, “I’m not your husband. I’m another version of your husband from another universe. Because we need your help.”
Across the multiverse, he tells her, he’s seen thousands worlds and thousands of possible versions of her own self, her own life. Then he uses chapstick to dial into another universe, and a brown, leather fanny pack becomes a weapon. Googly eyes are also prominet plot points, as well as a universe where humans have evolved to have floppy fingers, like hotdogs. None of this makes much sense, and Minic said, that doesn't bother him.
“They’re very imaginative. They have a very wacky surreal sense of humor," Minic said.
The film really isn’t about cosmology or physics, so much as how to find meaning in the absurd. And love, and connection amidst thousands of possible realities.
Minic said he’s a fan, not so much because of the filmmakers’ loose interpretation of the concept of the multiverse, but for the quality of the storytelling.
“I think it’s a great work of art,” Minic said. "And they have this existential philosophy. That essentially, the world is out there, bigger than us, and here we are in the world, we find themselves, and we have to kind of figure out what happens to us.”
