Earlier this week I mentioned that I was gone for the weekend in New York. I was there to see a play directed by our friend Jesse: a production of Alan M. Berks’ Almost Exactly Like Us. I’ve seen a good number of Jesse’s productions… erm… directions now, and this one was probably one of my favorites. Since this isn’t a theatre blog and I’m not a theatre person I won’t discuss specifically what he did (you should just go and see it if you live in New York; it runs through this Saturday and tickets are only $12. I mean, c’mon. You can’t get a decent mixed drink in Manhattan for $12). I will say, though, that I think it was an excellent script for him to take on and I very much enjoyed the concept.
It tells the story of four characters: a young college mathematics professor, his wife, her brother, and a young female student. The story of all four plays out in war-torn Chechnya, an environment incredibly foreign to the American characters. As the professor and the young student meet it’s revealed she’s sort of escaped there under the guise of teaching English. The professor eventually gives up that he’s there with his brother-in-law (a somewhat lost Evangelical Christian) and that his wife is dead. He claims he’s there to teach economic mathematics to wealthy businessmen. The locals, you see, don’t use base 10 for their counting system and this, he posits, is what makes them seem so completely foreign to everyone else.
The second act opens with the same characters but not this same story. Instead they’re back in the United States, at a fundamentalist Christian college. The professor starts with a sort of serene Hindu-cattle look on his face that seems de rigeur for Christian fundamentalists but as the act progresses it slowly melts back into the strained, wild look of a predator who has gone too long without a kill that he had in the first act. It’s abundantly clear that this is his true nature and not the Godliness he desired to project. So, too, are the other characters in a different world and yet similar to who they were in the first act. The young student is still striving to escape her own surroundings, to where she doesn’t yet know. The brother-in-law is no longer a misguided Evangelical but instead a 7th-year undergrad in the fine tradition of Jeremy Piven in PCU: an armchair rebel who wants desperately to believe in something, but whose comfort in his own prescribed and predictable social deviance prevents him from moving forward. If only something could remove that comfort he just might believe in something, or at least try to. Finally, the wife appears alive this time but with a deadened expression that reveals she no longer derives any joy from her life and has absolutely zero sense of belonging with her own surroundings. As she literally departs off-stage it’s evident she doesn’t really belong there at all.
Finally, in the third act, the characters appear in a post-apocalyptic landscape that has stripped them of any social normalcy but they are, still, who they are. Or, if there’s nothing under the veil of social normalcy they desire to project as in the case of the professor, they are not.
Three different worlds but the same four people. Alternate reality. A universe where something, somewhere, changed, and based on the different possible outcomes of that one thing, a butterfly effect transforms the results of each possible different outcome into a universe drastically different. It’s a theme in a number of pop culture productions including one of my favorite Futurama episodes (The Farnsworth Parabox) as well as one of my favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes (Yesterday’s Enterprise). It asks two fundamental questions: 1) do multiple universes – a sort of multiverse – exist and, 2) if there is a branching point forming multiple universes, are we still the same people in those universes? In other words, is what makes us us immutable or malleable?
The answer to the first is a definite maybe. The term “multiverse” seems to have been first coined by psychology pioneer William James and by this point a lot of theoretical physicists have had a say about it. The existence of multiple universes is predicted by string theory (which I will not get into here) and even our old friend Richard Feynman based some of his work on it. In recent years, Swedish-American cosmologist Max Tegmark has put forth a formalized theory as to the existence of multiple universes and how they might come to exist. So, yes, for the sake of argument, it’s perfectly prudent to assume multiple universes exist.
That second question about what makes us us seems like a more philosophical one but I move that it can also be approached from a lens of theoretical Physics. Why? Well, because the existence of multiple universes branching forth from different outcomes of a single event is basically a pre-requisite of retrograde time travel.
I didn’t think I’d get another chance to use this image.
If it is possible to travel back in time – and I’ll spare you the various Physics rhetoric surrounding time travel here since it’s incredibly thick – then the act of doing so necessarily creates a separate universe than the one in which one started. Say I travel back in time to warn my 10 year-old self not to ditch my Nintendo when I got a Sega Genesis because I’d want it back later. The original universe I come from – called the Prime Universe – doesn’t have me in it from two decades in the future offering such a warning. Therefore, the one where I do travel back in time and warn my younger self is different and has split off into a second universe where, when we reach 2010, things will have a different outcome. The question is, will Jon2 be effectively the same guy as Jon1? Will, like the characters in Almost Exactly Like Us, I have the same sort of attitude about life with just a bit of a different outcome? What if, instead, I tell myself at that age to buy a bunch of Slint and Sonic Youth albums? Will I grow up to be an insufferable hipster instead of a scientist? Or will I be the same person on the inside with a slightly more ironic exterior?
Of course, people do change, and so does our concept of what’s “right” and “wrong” with the world. So, ultimately, maybe our own sense of who we are is only as immutable as the Universe itself. So, just how changeable is the Universe?
If the Universe can really be manipulated in such a way as to allow for time travel, then, well, shouldn’t we have seen time travelers already? This is an ofshoot of the Fermi paradox that questions why we haven’t seen any evidence of other, intelligent extra-terrestrial life (sightings of little green men by inebriated rednecks aside) if they really do exist. As for the question of the lack of time travelers, there are three possible answers. One is, of course, that time travel really isn’t possible. Bo-ring. The second is that it is possible but we manage to obliterate ourselves in the future before any other intelligent life forms are able to locate us. Possible – if not likely – but still not exciting. The third, though, plays off of Clarke’s Third Law that any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic. Maybe time travel is possible but we’re just not advanced enough to detect it – or those who use it – yet. This is certainly, by far, the most interesting possible outcome.
The thing is, though, that we can’t possibly have the answer to that quandary now. So we’ll just have to see what the future holds the good old fashioned way. When we get there, we’ll have to stop and ask, are we fundamentally different? Or will we be almost exactly like us?
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