Doppelgängers? Parallel Universes? Time Travellers?

Photo credit: John Titor's Time Machine, as posted by him on an internet message board



Kylie Minogue's music video, "Come Into My World," exemplifies a looping narrative - characteristic of new media narratives, from video games to flash animations. (see article "Generation Flash: Turntable and Flash Remixing" - click here.) Does it also suggest a changing world view, one that takes for granted parallel universes?

In the vernacular, "Doppelgänger" has come to refer (as in German) to any double or look-alike of a person—most commonly an "evil twin". The word is also used to describe the sensation of having glimpsed oneself in peripheral vision, in a position where there is no chance that it could have been a reflection.

They are generally regarded as harbingers of bad luck. In some traditions, a doppelgänger seen by a person's friends or relatives portends illness or danger, while seeing one's own doppelgänger is an omen of death. In Norse mythology, a vardøgr is a ghostly double who precedes a living person and is seen performing their actions in advance.

The idea of doppelgängers is also seen in fiction involving time travel and parallel universes. In this case, the doppelgänger really "is" the doubled person, but from a different timeline or different version of the universe.

Source: Wikipedia

Do you have an exact double somewhere in the world? Can a person be in two places at once? There are many intriguing accounts throughout history of people who claim to have either encountered apparitions of themselves - their doppelgangers - or have experienced the phenomenon of bilocation, being in two separate locations at the very same time.

"Doppelganger" is German for "double walker" - a shadow self that is thought to accompany every person. Traditionally, it is said that only the owner of the doppelganger can see this phantom self, and that it can be a harbinger of death. Occasionally, however, a doppelganger can be seen by a person's friends or family, resulting in quite a bit of confusion.

In instances of bilocation, a person can either spontaneously or willingly project his or her double, known as a "wraith," to a remote location. This double is indistinguishable from the real person and can interact with others just as the real person would.

For some stories about reported Doppelganger incidences, click here.
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Continuing on the science fiction theme of parallel universes, there is the curious case of John Titor. John Titor is the name used by the person or persons claiming to be a time traveler from the year 2036 who posted on several time-travel–related bulletin boards during 2000/2001. In these posts he made numerous ambiguous predictions about events in the near future, starting with events in 2004. Whether or not John Titor was a hoax has been a topic of controversy on web-based paranormal discussion boards.

In his online postings, Titor claimed to be an American soldier from the year 2036 who was assigned to a government time travel project. He was supposedly sent back to 1975 to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer which he claimed was needed to "debug" various legacy computer programs in 2036. According to IBM engineer Bob Dubke, Titor's statements regarding the IBM 5100's ability to emulate and debug mainframe systems were correct. It has been stated that this information was not publicly available when Titor made his declaration. He claimed he was making a stopover in 2000 in order to observe the effects of the Y2K bug, and this is when he started posting to the discussion groups.

When asked why the time machine did not lead to time travel paradoxes, he stated that this was explained through the many-worlds interpretation (or as it was called, the Everett-Wheeler model), which he claimed was proven to be correct in the future. Simplistically, the Many Worlds theory suggests that for any event that could have different possible outcomes, every one of those outcomes occurs in a separate "universe". According to the posts, a time traveler does not actually enter their own past, but some other, similar, past. When asked to use the time machine to perform some paradoxical action, he replied that that would only affect this universe, but not his. He appeared to imply that there were many worldlines, and his time machine could not control its outgoing destination exactly, but could return to a worldline exactly similar to his own home. His originating "worldline" would, in turn, receive a John Titor exactly similar to the original. Therefore, his original "worldline" would indeed receive the benefit of his mission.

For more information on John Titor, visit Wikipedia, or the John Titor web site.
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Meeting the Multiverse


To test the theory of parallel universes, or multiverses, a £2.6 billion CERN laboratory is being built, in part to see if it can find evidence of their existence. CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world's largest particle physics centre. It sits astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva.

CERN is a laboratory where scientists unite to study the building blocks of matter and the forces that hold them together. CERN exists primarily to provide them with the necessary tools. These are accelerators, which accelerate particles to almost the speed of light and detectors to make the particles visible.

"String theory brought to the forefront the idea that there may be more to the universe than just three spatial dimensions — height, width, length — plus time. There could be six more dimensions that we fail to perceive, possibly because they are so tiny and curled up and hidden from view, or perhaps because some are infinite in extension. These new spatial directions are the “warped passages” of the book’s title: a concept that has dominated Randall’s thinking during the last several years. This book is a chronicle of her theoretical adventures within this brave (and strange) new world.

At first, theorists postulated that it was the strings themselves that oscillated within these many dimensions, allegedly creating the various particles found in the cosmos. More recently, that idea has expanded to include membranes, or “branes” for short. A brane is essentially a slice out of that multidimensional world. According to this view, we might be living on a four-dimensional brane (space + time), which itself is immersed inside the full dimensional realm known in its entirety as the “bulk.” Such entities as light waves, electrons, and protons are confined to our specific brane, according to Randall, much like water droplets trapped on a shower curtain.

Given this setup, Randall offers a new and mind-blowing take on the universe — or “multiverse,” as we may be residing amid other branes, other parallel universes, within this complex higher-dimensional domain. “Thinking about branes makes you aware of just how little we know about the space in which we live,” she writes. “The universe might be a magnificent composition linking intermittent branes.” If there is life on those other branes, they likely experience different forces and possibly even different forms of matter. Randall stresses that, despite the science-fiction quality to this notion, evidence for these higher dimensions might actually be obtainable in the foreseeable future. “Experimental tests of competing hypotheses are near at hand, and within a decade,” she predicts, “there should be a dramatic revision in our understanding of fundamental physical laws that will incorporate whatever is discovered....”

"Meeting the Multiverse," Marcia Bartusiak, Harvard Magazine, November-December 2005