Cosmic casino

Imagine a universe where a guru is the contender for prime-ministership instead of the chela. Another has a woman Prime Minister in place of the bearded economist. Yet another has the President swapping places with the Prime Minister. Stories of such parallel universes are the staple of fiction: in Philip K Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle, for instance, Hitler has won the war in a world that has Amerikaas a Nazi puppet! Philip Roth’s The Plot Against Americadepicts the defeat of President Franklin D Roosevelt at the hands of the anti-Semitic aviator Charles Lindbergh. But, of late, mainstream physicists have also started joining the “multiverse” bandwagon, which takes us to many possible worlds.

The celeb cosmologist Stephen Hawking evoked one multiverse in which China had been edged out as a sporting superpower by Belize, which won every gold medal at the Olympic Games! The universe was kind of “cosmic casino”, the physicist said, in which the roll of the celestial dice led to myriads of possibilities: out of these, we humans saw or experienced only one but all were “real”.

Such ideas have been echoed in the Indian spiritual tradition: the Yoga Vashishthaabounds with stories about universes within universes. Swami Vivekananda articulated one such vision in his Raja Yoga: “The definition of this world of ours is only little of the Infinite Existence projected on to the plane of consciousness,” he said. Paradoxically, one can hope to escape to the grander scale only by letting go of this little projection we call ego. That is easier said than done.