In-Between Spaces

Coincidentally, this month I read two books of fiction that feature the multiverse. What is the multiverse? It’s the idea that as we make choices in our lives, our space-time lines split into new universes as divergent paths are taken. This would mean universes are constantly splitting and there exist an infinite number of universes capturing every possible path traversed. This is the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics generally attributed to the physicist Hugh Everett.

 

Is there evidence for the multiverse? Everett’s interpretation suggests that the equations of quantum mechanics do not preclude this scenario, and might even require it – at least if you believe in real possible non-deterministic choices. But is there “hard” evidence? No. And it’s unclear how one would test the Many Worlds hypothesis because there is no clear path between one universe and another. These worlds exist side-by-side yet are inaccessible to each other. How could that be? Well, time and space are funny things – at least according to physics. Science is stranger than fiction, thereby giving rise to interesting science fiction. Even if you don’t think you read science fiction, you’ve encountered time-travel, wormholes, and multiverses, in the movies, on popular TV shows and in the mass media. They’re fun to think about, but there’s no proof they exist.

 

The Midnight Library (written by Matt Haig) opens the narrative with a young woman about to kill herself. That sounds like a morbid way to begin a story that reads like a novel geared at young adults. But at the moment between life and death, the young woman finds herself transported to a strange space that resembles a library with shelves and shelves of books. It’s a liminal space. Transient. In-between. And the books contain stories of her other lives – paths she could have taken. She gets to explore these, accessing the multiverse via the in-between space of the liminal library.

 

No spoilers from me, except to say that the author cleverly uses a mechanism of “zoning out” to afford these visits. Just as the Matrix movies hints that the reason behind the feeling of déjà vu might indicate that you’re in a computer simulation, these zoning out episodes might be a glimpse that the Midnight Library is in operation. You wouldn’t classify Haig’s book as science-fiction, although it utilizes this clever mechanism to explore the roads not taken… although there’s a hint they could be if one so chose.

 

The Space Between Worlds (written by Micaiah Johnson) would indeed fall under the sci-fi genre. The protagonist is also a young woman who is born and grows up in a situation where death is rampant and comes easily. Therein lies the key to bodily accessing the multiverse. The premise is that technology has built the ability to traverse the multiverse. How the transporter works is nebulous – it’s literally a black box that’s spherical. But to survive the trip to an alternate universe, you must be dead in that other timeline. Otherwise bad things happen. As our young protagonist travels to her other “world” she traverses a liminal space that invokes ancient gods and mysteries, and perhaps the key to what holds the multiverse together.

 

But this isn’t what’s explored as science-technology questions are not the focus of the book. It’s about people and the choices they make. The space between worlds is about the gap between the haves and the have-nots, much like you might see in a movie such as Elysium or District 9. Johnson’s emphasis on peoples of different ethnicities reminds me of the writing in The Fifth Season (by N. K. Jemisin) although the latter has more prominent science elements. Both are excellent books, and I expect they will be made into movies -  Johnson’s likely being the more tractable. No spoilers from me other than to say that life and death lurk prominently as one travels in between spaces (or times).

 

The question that reading these books brought to my mind: What is the space in between spaces? I hadn’t really asked myself that question because we typically think of space as the thing in between objects. The ancient Greeks might have been the first to articulate something that seems natural to us: There exist Atoms and the Void. Atoms are discrete. The void is continuous, and it’s the open space forming the backdrop allowing the movement of discrete objects. Without it, no movement. But could space be discrete rather than continuous? Can it be chopped up into tiny pieces and then chopped no further? And what are the implications if space is discrete?

 

We sometimes think of time, the fourth-dimension of space-time, as being discrete. We measure moments. Blocks of time. And if those blocks get small enough, we can’t sense them, thereby allowing the movie industry to thrive by showing us reels of static pictures, each slightly different from the other, but separated by a time block too small for us to tell. Perhaps this is why quantum mechanics can be so speculative. It deals with spaces and times too small for us to directly sense or even build a device to tell if there are in-between spaces or in-between times.

 

If atoms and the void are all that exist, and if you wait long enough, any arrangement of atoms within that void, no matter how rare, might arise again. Maybe the accessing of different spaces in the multiverse is simply time-travel in the very, very long game. In thermodynamics, we have a word to describe such a system. Ergodic. A god-like vision appears in The Space Between Worlds. The Ur-God perhaps. An ancient one outside of time and space. Einstein called some of this deep physics the Secrets of the Old One. We have yet to uncover them. But in the meantime, I recommend both The Midnight Library and The Space Between Worlds. Both are engaging pieces of story-telling and very well written!