It’s Fashionable to Take a Trip to Another Universe

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It’s Fashionable to Take a Trip to Another Universe
July 25,2011
by Dennis Overbye
The New York Times

The thing about parallel universes — which may be great or terrible — is that in theory they don’t collide.

There may be an alternate reality in which Mookie Wilson’s grounder does not go through Bill Buckner’s legs, costing the Red Sox the 1986 World Series, but Mets fans in this one don’t have to confront it. You don’t have to engage with a universe in which you bought Apple stock while it was cheap, or with the wealthier, smarter you asking why you were such an idiot, but neither do you get to find out what would have happened if you had spoken to that woman at the art gallery that December night.

But what if the alternate universes did collide? Could you encounter another version of yourself? Would you like yourself? What would you say?

“Better luck next time,” is the answer Rhoda Williams, an anguished young woman who has forsaken astrophysics for janitorial work, blurts to the man who is about to become her lover in the new film “Another Earth,” a meditation on guilt and redemption in crisscrossing worlds. Manohla Dargis’s review in The New York Times called it “a coming-of-adulthood story that improbably blends a plaintive drama with romantic longing and far-out science fiction.”

Rhoda has earned her bleakness. Four years earlier, as a drunken teenager bound for M.I.T., she smashed into this same man’s car, killing his wife, son and unborn child and leaving him in a coma. Drawn to him out of an urge for repentance after four years in prison but unable to confess who she is, Rhoda has entered a risky relationship, first as his housecleaner and then gradually more, with the man, John Burroughs, who was a famous composer before the accident.

The story gets its title from the discovery, on the same day as the accident, of what looks like a duplicate Earth, complete with moon and blue oceans. As this Earth gets closer and plans are made to send a space shuttle to it, Rhoda signs up on the hope that history might have gone differently there and that Burroughs’s family is still alive.

The movie, directed by Mike Cahill and written by Mr. Cahill and Brit Marling, stars Ms. Marling as Rhoda and William Mapother as John Burroughs. It was first shown in February at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for the best film with a science theme and a Special Jury Prize for drama.

“Another Earth” is not science fiction in the sense that we have to come to expect it — there are no special effects or monsters other than the failings of human nature itself. Moreover, on one level, the science in “Another Earth” is silly. The sudden appearance of a duplicate Earth makes no astronomical sense and violates pretty much everything we know about gravity and about planetary orbits. Indeed, the Sloan judges debated whether there was enough science in the movie, according to Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology and a member of the panel, before concluding that it represented a fanciful extrapolation of the idea, fashionable in physics and cosmology, of multiple universes.

“So the movie doesn’t teach you much physics, or even obey any set of coherent and plausible physical laws. But it borrows ideas from physics and uses them to launch a particular trajectory, which it then faithfully follows,” Dr. Carroll said in an e-mail, calling the movie “an excellent example of a certain kind of fruitful interaction between science and cinema.”

Multiple universes are all the rage these days. In quantum physics, where each throw of Heisenberg’s dice can result in a different universe, they are called Many Worlds. In the reigning theory of the Big Bang there are “pocket universes” eternally forming and bubbling away from one another. In string theory there is a 10-dimensional “landscape” of an almost incalculable number of different universes, each of which is a solution to the basic string equations with different properties and perhaps even dimensions.

These theories solve many important problems, like why the universe we live in is fit for life — we live where we can. But they also suggest that if you go far enough or wait long enough, everything that can happen will happen and we will run into duplicates of ourselves — in fact an infinite number of them.

Ms. Marling, 27, and Mr. Cahill, 32, who were economics majors at Georgetown and met at a film festival there, said they didn’t have cosmology or science fiction in mind when they started this film. In a joint interview on the eve of the film’s premiere, Ms. Marling, fascinated by the notion of doppelgängers, said she was interested in a more “macroscopic” question: “What would it be like if you could confront yourself?”

The duplicate Earth, she said, appeared as a visual manifestation of this concept. They didn’t know about multiple universes until someone sent them a copy of “The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos,” by the Columbia University physicist Brian Greene.

Ms. Marling said, “We thought we were making this stuff up.” Meanwhile, Mr. Cahill, who calls himself “a hard-core science fiction geek,” was listening to audio recordings of “Pulp Physics,” a history of astronomy by Richard Berendzen, a professor at American University. Entranced by his voice as well as by the grand drama of cosmic history, the filmmakers called him up and asked if he would be in the film.

Ms. Marling said, “He understood that we were using science for poetry, for metaphor.” In the movie he plays the role of narrator, ruminating on the radio about the meaning of the other Earth and the cosmic loneliness of humanity. “Am I alone? We on Earth would like to know,” he says. At another point he asks, “Can I learn from the other me?”

Wisely, Mr. Cahill and Ms. Marling do not try to answer that or any of the other questions — like whether doppelgängers will like each other — the film raises. “There is no wrong answer emotionally,” Mr. Cahill said.

Mr. Cahill said that he considered “Another Earth” to be a science fiction movie despite the lack of computer graphics, heartbreaking vistas and other special effects that have come to characterize the genre. “At heart,” he said, “sci-fi is a lot of ideas.”

Ms. Marling chimed in to say that the goal of science fiction is to throw up a new lens on reality and get a bit closer to what it means to be human.

“Sometimes in science fiction you can get closer to the truth than if you had followed all the rules,” she said.