Tess and Harry on the Dock
“If there are an infinite number of universes,” said Tess, “does that mean there is one where my hair doesn’t get tangled all the time and I get good grades in Spanish?
” She wanted to ask if there was a universe where she didn’t hear the voices, but she had not confessed the presence of those voices to her father.
Still, she liked to think that somewhere, in some parallel plane of existence, there lived a happy, untroubled Tess.
“Not necessarily,” said her father. “Just because there is infinite variety in the universes doesn’t mean that all possibilities exist.”
“But why not? It seems like it should mean exactly that. That anything is possible.”
“Anything is possible, but that doesn’t mean every possibility exists. Consider the willow oak.”
“Why should I consider the willow oak?”
“Because I’m going to use it as an example of how infinite variety doesn’t mean the existence of all possibilities.
Now a fully mature willow oak can have as many as a million leaves.
And the tree can live for over a hundred years, so that’s more than a hundred million leaves.
Each leaf has its own pattern of veins. Each leaf buds and drops from the tree at a specific moment in time.
After falling from the tree each leaf might blow away to any of millions of specific spots or be eaten or partially eaten by any of millions of individual insects or be carried away by a bird to countless locations.
And there are tens of millions of these trees alive at any given moment—and each one has an arrangement of limbs, a specific height, a pattern of roots, and so on.
It’s easy to imagine an infinite number of universes that only differ in almost unnoticeable variations of this one species. ”
“That’s pretty boring,” said Tess. “All those universes and the only difference is a leaf drops five minutes earlier in one universe than another.”
“It may seem boring to you, but the truth doesn’t have to be fascinating.”
“But even if there are millions of possibilities for millions of leaves and so on, that doesn’t have to mean infinity, does it? I mean a finite number, no matter how big, times another finite number, no matter how big, is still a finite number.”
“I forget sometimes how smart you are,” said Harry. “Take another example. A blank sheet of paper.”
“White,” said Tess, who had recently discovered musical theater in the form of a stack of CDs in Marie’s closet. “A blank page or canvas. His favorite. So many possibilities.”
“Exactly,” said Harry, completely missing the Sondheim reference. “So many possibilities. When you take out a blank sheet of paper to create a work of art or a poem or a page of a book or a paper airplane or an origami swan, the possibilities are limitless.”
“But are they infinite?” asked Tess.
“They might be. You might take out a piece of paper tomorrow and draw a picture of the moon on it. And in every other universe—every one of the infinite universes—the only difference might be what you put on that piece of paper.”
“But what about the butterfly effect?”
“I see you’ve been paying attention when I talk to you.”
“Of course I pay attention,” said Tess.
“You’re right, Tess. It’s possible that there is a universe that is exactly like ours except a particular leaf falls off a tree a nanosecond earlier. And it’s also possible that, in falling from its branch a nanosecond early, that leaf changes everything.”
“But we’ll never know, will we? We’ll never know what that leaf changes.”
“No,” said Harry, hoisting himself up. “We never will.”
A few minutes after Harry tucked in his daughter, Marie came in to say good night to Tess.
“Still awake?” she asked.
“I’m just thinking about universes,” said Tess.
“Oh, just universes, so nothing big.”
“I want to believe that if there are an infinite number of universes, at least one of them has a Tess who doesn’t have my troubles.”
“And what troubles would those be?”
“Just difficulties.”
“We all have difficulties, Tess. I’m sure there is a universe in which Tess has different difficulties from the ones you have, but I can’t imagine a universe in which Tess or anyone else has no difficulties.”
“I’d settle for different ones,” said Tess.
“Be careful what you wish for.”