Can We Reach Other Universes?

Navigating the Hypothetical Multiverse

If you’re a Marvel fan like me, you probably caught the first trailer for WandaVision, an upcoming TV series that will follow the relationship between Scarlet Witch and a newly resurrected Vision. Many fans expect Vision to have returned as part of a pocket universe created by Scarlet Witch to cope with the pain of losing him in Infinity War. If you’re not a Marvel fan, odds are none of that made sense to you. However, all you need to know is that WandaVision is expected to be the latest sci-fi story to employ the concept of multiple universes, a.k.a. the multiverse.

The multiverse is a fun storytelling device for writers, but it’s also a concept taken very seriously by theoretical and experimental physicists. You’ve probably heard of at least one multiverse hypothesis, but there are actually quite a few. Most of these hypotheses aren’t mutually exclusive, so we may currently exist in more than one type of multiverse. However, science demands that a hypothesis have experimental evidence before it can be considered a full-fledged theory. To that end, we’re left to ask if it’s at all possible to detect the existence of another universe. If so, could we ever go there? To answer these questions, we need to look at several multiverse ideas and their testable predictions.