Doctor Strange and the Multiverse in Science
Doctor Strange’s latest adventures find him hopping across the multiverse, meeting alternate versions of himself and his enemies as he tries to save not just our universe but every universe. In popular media and our imaginations, Doctor Strange isn’t alone. We surround ourselves with concepts of a multiverse, which present the tantalizing possibility that our reality isn’t the only one.
The multiverse isn’t a creation born from a writer’s notebook, but from a physicist’s chalkboard. Of course, the multiverse found in science is a little bit different than the ones found in movies. There’s a lot less fighting interdimensional demons and a lot more math. But the multiverse of our media owes its existence to a plausible scientific hypothesis. One that’s testable—and has been tested.
Multiverse ideas go back to antiquity, starting with the open question of the possibility of other worlds like our own, scattered throughout the universe (or various conceptions of “the universe”). In modern physics, however, there are only a few distinct places where the notion arises.
To define the multiverse, we first have to define the universe. In the strictest sense, the universe is the limit of all we can ever observe. Our cosmos is only so old, and light can only travel so quickly, so from our vantage point on the Earth we are surrounded by a bubble, roughly 45 billion light-years in radius, that contains all the light that has reached us by the present day.
