"...it was a heart-bumping eerie thing when a nuclear missile passed through Van Rijn's own body. No, by damn, through the space where they coexisted with different frequencies - must be precise -..." (p. 125)
The ships are affected by each other's tractor and pressor beams although not by missiles?
We - or at least I - sometimes imagine alternative universes as parallel four-dimensional space-time continua separated by short distances along a fifth (fourth spatial) dimension. However, another rationale for a multiverse is the concept that the universes occupy the same three-dimensional space while vibrating at different frequencies. Thus, one of Poul Anderson's hyperdrive spaceships might get into phase with a whole other universe and opt to stay there?
If two universes change their frequencies so that they oscillate at the same rate, then they mutually annihilate like, to cite yet another multi-cosmic scenario, the matter and anti-matter universes in James Blish's The Triumph Of Time. Superheroes must prevent cosmic annihilations but sometimes facilitate mergers where histories combine.
Valeria Matuchek's explanation seems ambiguous:
"'You can picture the cosmoses as lying parallel to each other, like the leaves in a book. That isn't strictly true, either; they occupy the same space-time, being separated by a set of dimensions -'"
-Poul Anderson, A Midsummer Tempest (London, 1975), xii, p. 101.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And all this reminds me of Sean Carroll's discussion of quantum mechanics and alternate worlds in SOMETHING DEEPLY HIDDEN, albeit I don't claim to understand everything in that book. Or Frank Tipler's THE PHYSICS OF CHRISTIANITY.
Ad astra! Sean
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