Staring Into The Multiverse

Elisha Huddleston and her colleagues at the Phillipsburg Site

Elisha Huddleston approached Jacob Malachi who was still sitting watching the door. He could see close to a dozen people walking around the other site.

“Can we hear what they’re saying?” She asked him.

“Of course,” he answered.

“I’d like to hear them,” she reiterated.

“Of course.”

He approached the door and turned on the speakers. They were speaking backward again, and he reversed it.

“This is a somber place,” Anita Oliver, one of the younger women on the other side was saying.

“It does the same thing for me,” her male companion Robert Maxwell agreed. “I don’t know that people are going to want to come here.”

“It’s awful. What happened to them?” The woman continued. “The thought of it just makes me nauseous.”

“You can turn it off now. It’s too upsetting to listen to them,” Elisha acknowledged.

“It is a sobering revelation,” Jacob acknowledged, “to realize that time is not what we think it is! That tragedies can happen any time.”

“I don’t want it to happen anywhere, “ Elisha lamented. “Why is this happening?”

“I think this is happening because the universe is indeterminate, for the same reason for the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle,” Jacob explained.“What if there are more than two timelines, each one expressing one aspect of probabilistic uncertainty?”

“Why can’t we discover the other timelines? Why do we experience only one at a time?” she asked.

“Good question, uncertain answer,” Jacob replied. “I have been considering a possible hypothesis. Perhaps dreams are a part of it. When we are in REM sleep, our brains are processing the alternative data.”

“I don’t remember my dreams,” Elisha answered.

“Unfortunately, I have very vivid dreams,” he continued. “ I think my subconscious is trying to tell me something.”

“Why can’t I experience a certain timeline where everything goes right for me?” Elisha complained. “I’ve had more than my share of difficulties.”

“I like that word, difficulties. It covers a multitude of sins,” Jacob responded. “We were fortunate that we weren’t on that train.”

“Yet, we still have our private situations,” she answered.

For a moment, Elisha contemplated her circumstances, the deaths of her parents, the cancer of her sister Ellen and all the various difficulties which she had personally experienced. She realised that almost no one went untouched by personal tragedy.

“Why can’t I experience one where everything doesn’t go wrong? After this interlude is over for me, I return to parking cars.” Jacob expressed. “I’m not complaining. I’m happy to be here, and to be able to help with this project. I feel like I’ve been preparing my whole life for this project.”

“I think it would be cruel,” she began again to tell these people that another timeline exists where this tragedy didn’t happen without providing a remedy for that situation. This is far from a comforting revelation.”

Susan Chan also approached the door.

“So what are they doing on the other side?” Susan asked.

“They’re looking at the site,” Elisha answered. “ I can’t imagine what it must be like for them in their timeline!”

“Nigel Fox was supposed to have stopped that train wreck,” Susan answered. “I read about it.” She hesitated. “I also read a couple of days ago that he had died in Virginia.”

“Who was Nigel Fox?” Elisha asked.

“Just some television entrepreneur from Bayside Queens who supposedly stopped the trainwreck in our timeline,” Susan explained.

“For those people,” Elisha spoke and pointed to them, “apparently that outcome didn’t happen and they had to deal with the train wreck. What are we supposed to make of that? Does every divergent outcome produce a new timeline? Imagine how confusing it would all be.”

“Only if we discover it,” Jacob observed. “Only if we knew about the other timelines. Our brains are not wired to recognize any of this.”

“If I should go through that door and find myself on the other timeline,” Susan asked, “is that me who I would be speaking with or someone else?”

“Too many questions, no satisfying answers,” Jacob observed.

“What difference does it make” Elisha asked, “how many timelines or universes exist if we can only experience one at a time?”

“Would you want to live in more than one at a time? Imagine how confusing that would be?” Susan proposed. “Imagine in one timeline you’re married with a family and in the other you’re not.”

“Imagine in one you’re alive and in the other you’re sick or you died,” Elisha lamented. “I don’t think I like what we discovered. It doesn’t make me happy.”

“Since when has any scientific discovery, thus far brought happiness to everyone?” Edward joined them.

“Electricity and cell phones I think make most people happy. Imagine living without them?” Elisha responded.

These questions about the efficacy of technology had come up many times in their discussions and always with inconclusive results. These questions about the multiverse seemed more problematic. As they stood watching the other timeline through the open doorway, only Jacob had mustered the courage to go through the doorway to the other timeline. None of the others could even imagine doing the same thing. Jacob, after his experience, was not sure he would enter it a second time!

What they could never have imagined was that even the timeline they were sharing at this moment was not as stable as they imagined, nor could they have envisioned how complex and intricate the processes were in the cerebral cortex that made consciousness possible. The ancient Greeks had coined the word “nous” for the human mind, which they had postulated interacted with the physical world. It was not in itself physical, more of spirit than of matter. The “nous” or “noetic faculty” was the interface between the mind and body, the brain and the hypostasis or person that stood beneath it all! As physicists, they hoped to penetrate to what stood beneath the threshold of human awareness.

Of course, the problem for modern physics was that it was built on a materialistic framework, that made it difficult to imagine a realm of the spirit. Jacob Malachi, who had taught himself physics, was in the best position to think outside the box. It was for this reason, that I, Jonathan, had recruited him for this special project!