The Marvel Cinematic Universe really should be called the Marvel Cinematic Multiverse. In the films, alternate realities can be created and destroyed. Characters can also hop between them. This has allowed heroes like Spider-Man and Loki to team up with various versions of themselves. The Scarlet Witch and Doctor Strange can even possess the bodies of their interdimensional doppelgängers.
Superhero screenwriters aren’t the only ones intrigued by the idea of a multiverse. Some physicists think it’s possible that a multiverse might really exist. Why? Because the existence of many other universes could answer deep questions about our own.
“There are a lot of abstract ideas about other universes,” says Paul Halpern. He’s a physicist at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, Pa. One popular multiverse idea, he says, comes from the physics of the very biggest things: cosmology. Another comes from the physics of the very smallest stuff. That’s quantum mechanics.
A bubble bath of universes
Shortly after th...
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