At the Crossroads of Time, Science and History

Abstract

Our paper is searching for historical and discursive contexts which might explain the sudden flare-up of the idea of parallel worlds in the science, history and literature of the mid-20th-century. We are having in mind Hugh Everett’s universal wave function – known later as the many-worlds interpretation of the quantum entanglement –, the forking trajectories from a single choice situation in time (Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths) or in space (Andre Norton’s The Crossroads of Time), and alternative histories, such as J. C. Squire’s 1932 collection of counterfactual essays, If It Happened Otherwise. The origins of this mental representation are identified in the break-up of the continuity with classical, identity logic and the rise of polyvalent logic ushered in by the theory of the superposition of contrary states, and the traumatic effect of the sudden onset of barbarism in totalitarian regimes in a modern Europe which had evolved towards democracy in the backdrop of the luminaries’ discourses, the political agenda of the Republic of Fraternity and Reason, or the parliamentary reforms in Victorian England.

Keywords

• multiverse
• quantum logic
• counterfactual history
• speculative fiction
• me copies