Somewhere, you’re Batman

Concepts of reality and consciousness have dominated much of philosophy since the dawn of civilisation. The idea self, of reality and our place in the universe is often so existentially frightening that many prefer to avoid attempting to explain it all together.

Entire religions and movements have been built across the world based around the conceptual explanation of what happens when we die, and the meaning of life. Indeed, almost every single war since the dawn of time up until the 20th century can perhaps reasonably be attributed to religious disputes.

Probably the most endearing feature of human experience, however, is its total lack of adequate explanation for our very reason to exist. It’s not so scary, you might think, to think of what might happen when you finally exit this mortal coil if literally anything is possible.

We’ve all heard the old line that, according to the theory of the multiverse, somewhere at some point, there’s a version of you that is Batman.

Again, the most pleasing aspect of that ridiculous statement is that nobody could every reasonably hope to prove it to be untrue, so why not imagine yourself as Batman somewhere?

The multiverse, however, isn’t some far-fetched science fiction concept that only provides us with comical ideas of other versions of ourselves; it’s a scientific idea that has a real possibility of being true. That’s according to The New Scientist at least.

“One of the most common misconceptions is that the multiverse is a hypothesis,” says Sean Carroll at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “It is a prediction of theories we have good reason to think are correct.”

There are a few misconceptions regarding the multiverse, however, according to the very same article, citing a few different schools of thought. According to Merriam Webster, the definition of the multiverse is “a theoretical reality that includes a possibly infinite number of parallel universes.”

Brian Cox talks of this hypothesis in his recent hit tour where he discusses his interpretation of astrophysics and its impact on our lives.

The cosmological theory goes something like this – The Big Bang itself was an explosion so violent, so extreme and so fast that it brought everything we understand to exist, into its existence, but what caused it and why? What if, this theory goes, the Big Bang was just one in a series of events in another place that we have no understanding of, and were to go on infinitely?

In such a scenario, there would then be an infinite amount of space-time, of matter, and of everything we understand to exist. But, crucially, a new universe created by a similar Big Bang, but created in only marginally different circumstances could easily create completely different laws of nature.

In the event of infinite universes created under infinite ranges of possibility, it follows that absolutely every possible scenario for everything throughout history has and will be tried and tested.

The article states “If the bubble universes exist in the same physical space, the many worlds are truly parallel universes, completely separate from one another. There is a bigger mathematical structure that they’re all inside, but in no sense does it look like space.”

If such a situation were true, then there are universes that exist where it is possible to travel in-between each other, where it’s possible that they know we exist parallel to themselves, and where time travel exists.

Crucially, though, according to some of the brightest minds in science, there is a place somewhere, somehow, where you’re Batman.