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Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Somewhere out there...

Parallel Universes: The History of an Idea

Saturday, June 12 at 2:30pm

Roundtable: Eva Brann, Christa Davis Acampora, David Morgan, Paul Park (moderator), David Weinberg

The notion of the parallel universe—the idea that a replica or near replica of the worlds we know, have known, or will know—has permeated imaginative thought in both science and art throughout the ages. Vedic philosophy introduces the notion of the wheel. Nietzsche propounded the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence around the same time that the French mathematician Poincaré introduced his Eternal Recurrence Theorem. Parallel universes appear in numerous science fiction works, such as Phillip K. Dick’s Man in a High Castle, and have appeared as motifs in numerous films, including the Clarence Oddbody sequence in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and in Peter Howitt’s Sliding Doors. This roundtable will examine the history of the idea of the parallel universe, and the confluence of thinkers from fields as varied as non-Euclidian geometry, Hinduism, romantic comedy, science fiction, and astrophysics who have wrestled with this imaginative concept.

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