Multiverse

“ Why from the smallest meteorite or satellite, to the largest star that shines in the firmament of heaven, there is nothing but motion; each satellite, planet, sun, and star moving on and on, ever and ever through the countless ages of time until its course is run and its existence ended. But rest, never! Such a thing as rest is unknown in the entire universe, whether it be in the atomic systems of matter, or the systems of stars and suns that form the universe of worlds. ”

“ This universe was made from nothing—nothing visible, nothing tangible, nothing the human eye could see or the human finger could touch. There was a time when the stars and planets, suns and worlds were transparent ether, as impalpable as the viewless air, and scattered as star dust in the measureless void of space along the forgotten highways of the past eternities. Silence reigned profound in the pulseless regions of the air, where, motionless and dumb, the atoms hung in dark and lifeless space. There was nothing in all this universe—nothing but cold, darkness and silence. ”

“ Another universe, not beyond, but alongside his own, hidden in the complex byways of Reimannian geometry and the mathematics of Einstein. A universe where time itself ran slower, where a year of normal time encompassed centuries. A ship could twist itself into that universe and travel just below the speed of light, the limit which, in normal space, was the barrier no ship could cross. But, in hyperspace, while the same barrier existed, a man from normal space could travel for centuries, covering great distances, while, for him, only a few months passed.
Merssu chuckled. ”

“ In the glowing globe now appeared our universe, a great galaxy of stars floating in space like their own. Swiftly, with shifting thoughts, I showed them its throngs of peopled worlds, the traffic that swept between its suns, the ordered life of its teeming, dissimilar races. Then as my thoughts shifted again they saw the first five thousand serpent-ships rushing in upon that galaxy, destroying all our fleet and settling upon the suns and worlds of the Cancer cluster, saw us fleeing inward and then turning to capture one of the serpent-ships by boarding it in mid-space. ”

“ From the early Nineteenth Century to this day, one riddle which has amazed and confounded scientists is the apparent movement of our universe. According to all evidence, our universe is composed of a multitude of galaxies—each of which is running away from all others at unbelievable speed.
"This we know because of the 'red shift'—which one might call the 'Doppler effect' applied to light, rather than to sound. When one star, comet or galaxy approaches another, pressing its light waves upon its neighbor, the cosmic body's light waves are shortened. ”

“ Multiplicity of worlds implies succession of worlds.Magnitudes and times, therefore, go parallel with one another. With the abandonment of the geocentric theory, and of the doctrine of the human destiny of the universe, have vanished the unworthy hypotheses of the recent date [336] of creation and the approaching end of all things. In their stead are substituted more noble ideas. The multiplicity of worlds in infinite space leads to the conception of a succession of worlds in infinite time. This existing universe, with all its splendours, had a beginning, and will have an end ”

“ We seem to have been able to glimpse from our Watch Tower, though through a glass darkly, the whole Truth, and to see that the Infinity of Time is a figment of our finite senses and is comprised in the Now. The same treatment, followed by the same result, may be applied to the Infinity of Space, and we again see that all Space is comprised in the Here; it is only by the conditions of our existence in this physical universe, insisting on our analysing everything in Time and Space that Motion or Change become the very basis of our Consciousness. ”

“ I mean the unity of phenomena—not merely the unity of life, put on a firm footing for all time by Darwin, though that is for my purpose the most important, but the unity of living and non-living, demanding a monistic conception of the universe. For the present, the stellar host (possibly, as recent astronomy seems to assert, assembled not in one system but in a multiplicity of universes, floating through space like a shoal of jelly-fishes in a Mediterranean bay) —the stars seem alien from our life, alien or at best neutral. ”

“ Our eyes and minds turned only to the window through which we could see, in the black abyss of space ahead, the faintly glowing universe of the serpent-people broadening slowly ahead as our ships raced on at full speed toward it.
A day passed, and that dying universe had grown across a full third of the vault of space before us, a great, dim-glowing region of flickering luminescence utterly different from the radiance of the shining Andromeda universe, that lay now far to our left. ”

“ In infinite space there may be infinite universes, but I hardly think they would be all universes of matter. That would indeed be a low conception of infinite power! Here, on earth, we see millions of distinct species of animals, millions of different species of plants, and each and [ 323] every species consisting often of many millions of individuals, no two individuals exactly alike; and when we turn to the heavens, no two planets, no two satellites alike; and outside our system we see the same law prevailing—no two stars, no two clusters, no two nebulæ alike. ”

“ All creation is in motion, we know. So we are taught. Earth moves about the sun, sun about the great hub of the galaxy, the galaxy in a mighty circle about its own directrix—space itself, 'ether,' so called, is like a mighty ball rolling and tumbling through unimaginable chaos. To this outside of space we cannot attain, for to go to the end of space is to return to the starting point. ”

“ Just as the stars about us are all in motion, so the starry systems beyond our sight may be in motion, and our system as a whole may be moving in concert with them. If this be so, then after interminable ages the aspect of the entire system of systems must change, its various members assuming new positions with respect to one another. In the course of time we may even suppose that our universe will approach relatively close to one of the others ”

“ But suppose matter could be dowered, that worlds could have a gravitation, one of two things must follow: It must have conscious knowledge of the position, exact weight, and distance of every atom, mass, and world, in order to proportion the exact amount of gravity, or it must fill infinity with an omnipresent attractive power, pulling in myriads of places at nothing; in Page 255 a few places at worlds. Every world must exert an infinitely extended power, but myriads of infinities cannot be in the same space. The solution is, one infinite power and conscious will. ”

“ Not the stars this time but universes stretch one behind the other beyond sight. Does this distribution too come to an end? It may be that imagination must take another leap, envisaging super-systems which surpass the spiral nebulae as the spiral nebulae surpass the stars. But there is one feeble gleam of evidence that perhaps this time the summit of the hierarchy has been reached, and that the system of the spirals is actually the whole world. As has already been explained the modern view is that space is finite—finite though unbounded. ”

“ Infinity, measurable only by the gauge of Infinity, is itself a speck, imperceptible; so that this my book, published in London, is on sale not only in the meanest stars, orbits, meteorites, moons, and suns of the most remote and recondite systems, but also throughout all the spaces interplanetary and interstellar, nebular or incandescent. More than this. Eternity, measurable only by the gauge of Eternity, is itself a moment, indivisible by time. ”

“ The present ragged edge of the grand universe, its uneven and unfinished periphery, together with the tremendously unsettled condition of the whole astronomical plot, suggests to our star students that even the seven superuniverses are, as yet, uncompleted. As we move from within, from the divine center outward in any one direction, we do, eventually, come to the outer limits of the organized and inhabited creation; we come to the outer limits of the grand universe. ”

“ They make their own world in their own mind and then find fault with it as if it was a reality.
Albert Russell Wallace, in the Fortnightly Review of March, 1903, in a labored article of great length, undertakes to carry the world back a thousand years to the time when man thought the earth was the center of the universe, and the stars were little openings or golden nails in the crystal vault of heaven. He says we are at the center of the universe; that our sun system belongs to a constellation situated near the center of the Milky Way. ”

“ Four of them are peopled with humans, far in advance of those of either Earth or Ento. In every direction are myriads of Worlds, inhab [Pg 36] ited by human beings in various stages of evolvement. Throughout limitless space are Suns and Systems of worlds, varying in bulk, and of diverse conditions, yet through intelligently directed energy, each shining wonder traverses pathless space, in conformity with unvarying law. In striving to conceive an idea of the universe, one is overwhelmed by its boundless immensity. ”

“ When we think of the universe, we think of that which is dimensionless, and when I say that always throughout the dimensionless universe, new worlds have been, and are coming into existence, and that dead worlds have been, and are undergoing disintegration, I but state accepted facts. Always, when new worlds become fitted for it, they receive that which Earth's scientists have not yet discerned—the quickening potentiality, the life impulse, which is the Divine Energy pervading the universe. ”

“ Thus the key to the physical conception of the Universe is to be found, and alone found, in that beauty of order, and harmony of motion, which are so inseparably associated with the varied forms of matter, graduating through a series of units or atoms, each with its dual nature complete in itself, through a series of minor entities termed elements, which in their aggregations form meteorites, satellites, planets, suns and stars, and systems of stars and oceans of suns and stars, until all are united into one ultimate unity where all are blended into one complete and perfect whole ”

“ Radiations, existing in the harmony of Universal Will, and being what we term the collective or the aggregate of Cosmic Will on the plane of the subjective Universe, unite together an infinitude of Monads—each the mirror of its own Universe—and thus individualize for the time being an independent Mind, omniscient and universal; and by the same process of magnetic aggregation they create for themselves objective, visible bodies, out of the interstellar Atoms. ”

“ Now, although any real conception of the immensity of the one stellar universe, of which the Milky Way with its associated stars is the fundamental feature, is, as I have shown, almost unattainable, the idea of an unlimited number of other universes, almost infinitely remote from our own and yet distinctly visible in the heavens, so seized upon the imagination that it became almost a commonplace of popular astronomy and was not easily given up even by astronomers themselves. ”

“ In other words, we are brought to the bewildering conclusion that thousands of these misty specks, the greater part of them too faint to be seen with the naked eye, are, not each a universe like our solar system, but each a "swarm" of universes of unappreciable magnitude. [A] The mind sinks, overpowered by the contemplation. ”

“ The astronomer, I assert, can neither from any data at his command postulate nor prove the beginning nor the end of the reverberating motion that exists in his solar system, which is itself the fragment of a system that is circulating and revolving in and about itself, and in which, since the birth of man, the universe he knows has not passed the first milestone in the road that universe is traveling in space immensity. ”

“ These little creatures have measured their world, and have noticed that the speed of its motion is constant; they have discovered that their planet covers a fixed distance in a fixed period of time, which for us is a minute and for them a century. Amongst their people there are two schools of thought. The scientists claim that the laws of the universe are immutable, and that no supernatural power can intervene to change them. ”

“ When we reflect on the vast distance of the fixed Stars, to which 162,000,000 of miles is but a point, we are filled with amazement at the immensity of their distance. But if we try to frame an idea of the extreme rapidity with which the Stars must move, if they move round the Earth in 24 hours, the thought becomes so much too big for our imagination, that we can no more conceive it than we do infinity or eternity. ”

“ Thus may the cosmic race, whose aggregate census makes up the stellar universe, be perpetuated—individual solar systems, such as ours, being born, and growing old, and dying to live again in their descendants, while the universe as a whole maintains its unified integrity throughout all these internal mutations—passing on, it may be, by infinitesimal stages, to a culmination hopelessly beyond human comprehension. ”