Taming the multiverse

• 14 July 2001
• Marcus Chown
• Magazine issue 2299

FLICKING through New Scientist, you stop at this page, think "that's interesting" and read these words. Another you thinks "what nonsense", and moves on. Yet another lets out a cry, keels over and dies.

Is this an insane vision? Not according to David Deutsch of the University of Oxford. Deutsch believes that our Universe is part of the multiverse, a domain of parallel universes that comprises ultimate reality.

Until now, the multiverse was a hazy, ill-defined concept—little more than a philosophical trick. But in a paper yet to be published, Deutsch has worked out the structure of the multiverse. With it, he claims, he has answered the last criticism of the sceptics. "For 70 years physicists have been hiding from it, but they can hide no longer." If he's right, the multiverse is no trick. It is real. So real that we can mould the fate of the universes and ...