From Garry Tee, University of Auckland
New Zealand
Rene van Slooten points out that, although Hugh Everett is generally credited
with the first scientific treatment (in 1957) of the concept of parallel
universes, he had been partially anticipated by the 16th-century philosopher
Giordano Bruno’s concept of “multiverse” (Letters, 19 April, p 55).
Van Slooten also quotes passages from Edgar Allen Poe’s remarkable
philosophical essay “Eureka”, in which Poe suggested parallel universes. (He
does not mention that Poe also gave, in the same essay, the first satisfactory
explanation of the darkness of the night sky.)
However, Rudjer Josip Boscovich (1711-1787), one of the most versatile
scientists of the 18th century, is renowned for his Theoria Philosophiae
Naturalis (1758). In that book, Boscovich developed a theory of matter as
consisting of many dimensionless points, with the mutual acceleration of any
pair of points being some general function of the distance between them,
represented by an oscillatory curve.
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He considered an oscillatory curve of such a form that “there can, so to
speak, arise from them any number of universes, each of them being similar to
the other, or dissimilar…and this too in such a way that no one of them has
any communication with any other…and such that all the universes of smaller
dimensions taken together would act merely as a single point compared with the
next greater universe, which would consist of little point-masses, so to speak,
of the same kind compared with itself”.
Boscovich’s book has directly influenced many later scientists, and it
continues to be much admired. His many scientific achievements include the first
proposal for a scientific theory of parallel universes.
