Parallel Universes: CJG Asks, Why Can't They Be Perpendicular?

A few days ago, crankyjewishguy's (CJG) friend, Bill, texted him from Florida, where he was on a bender with a bunch of middle aged guys, to see if CJG could pick him up the next day at Logan Airport in Boston. Bill assumed that because CJG is a writer he could easily drop everything and come pick him up because for a writer "everything" means typing a few paragraphs in the morning and then going to Starbucks for seven hours to have a mocha and a nap. Bill happens to be right about that, but the real question is why Bill, who is supposedly one of CJG's best friends, or so he thought until Bill texted him from Florida and CJG realized he was not with Bill in Florida but staring at three feet of snow that needed to be shoveled, didn't invite him for all the fun and games. Anyway, since Bill's entire work schedule consists of teaching three one-hour spin classes each week, the tables have been turned because this morning, in about twenty minutes as a matter of fact, Bill is coming to pick up CJG and drive him to Logan Airport because CJG is on his way to visit his brother in Boca where the five day forecast is calling for sunshine, temperatures in the mid-70s, and thousands of Jewish people in their upper 80s driving ten miles an hour.

Which brings us to today's topic: cosmology. While CJG was idling in front of the American Airlines terminal waiting for Bill last week, he was listening to Fresh Air with Terry Gross. She was interviewing Brian Greene, an astrophysicist from Columbia University about his new book, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos.  Greene is a kind of latter day Carl Sagan, adept at putting abstract concepts into easy to understand terms, except that as CJG listened he realized that though the analogies sounded nice and simple, the concepts were so mind boggling that he thought his head was going to explode.

Space: the final frontier. Or is it?

It seems to CJG that the reason concepts such as multiple universes and bending the time-space continuum are so hard to grasp is that most of us still haven't mastered the cable remote. Now we're supposed to wrap our heads around the idea that there may be many universes layered, Greene suggests, one on top of the other like so many slices of bread in which everything that's happening right now in our universe is happening in all these other universes, too. Actually, that last part was kind of comforting because it meant that there were, oh, maybe another ten or ten trillion cranky jewish guys listening to the same interview. If only we could call each other and form a support group. Then again, maybe all of us have the same cell phone number, too, in which case we'd just keep getting busy signals or be leaving messages for ourselves.

Anyway, the explanation for these carbon copy universes has something to do with the mathematical limitations of the ways in which matter can arrange itself so that eventually matter runs out of options and starts repeating itself, just like Rush Limbaugh. But, even if that's true, CJG isn't buying the notion that just because he's sitting in a Volvo listening to NPR at Logan Airport his counterparts in parallel universes are doing exactly the same thing. Even if we concede the existence of these parallel universes, why did cranky jewish guy in Universe #17, for example, also have to buy a used 2001 Volvo? And is his left tail light out, too? Is that state trooper also telling him to circle around? (By the way, do you understand the implications of all this for Starbucks' profits?) You see, this is where these geniuses who seem to be good at explaining all this arcane stuff fall down in CJG's humble opinion. For the sake of making what they are saying remotely accessible to those of us with just above average human brains, they say things that clearly can't be true because CJG knows for a fact that only in this universe could there possibly be a place like Boca Raton.

The one and only.