Fine Structure

by qntm

"The idea is that there are millions of universes arranged in a symmetrical loop. Radiating away from a central point. All focused in on the middle." Mitch Calrus, hunched over on the sofa looking over a mug of coffee at Seph Baird standing above him, is blank. "Right?" "To the left of us there's another universe just like ours. And to the right of us there's another universe just like ours. And there's a loop, and there could be billions of universes all in the loop. Berloff called it a 'chorus' of universes because all of them are... metaphorically 'singing the same song'. Eventually you get back to where you started. You have to, because of symmetry. And there were some calculations to back it up. But you can't prove it. Because any signal or object you fired off to your left... the universe to your right would simultaneously fire the same signal off to their left, right back at you. Sure, the exchange would take place, everything moves one jump around the chorus, but from your point of view nothing changes. So you can't test it. It's just a thought experiment. So it was proposed once in the 1960s, and Berloff wrote one paper on it, and then he died and everybody forgot all about it. It's called the Chorus Hypothesis."