‘So there are lots of universes besides ours,’ the ancient atomists concluded, in the brief account by Peter Jones (Ancient and modern, 29 March). ‘Dot Wordsworth,’ he added cheerfully, ‘will tell you that should be a multi-universe, not a multiverse.’ The trouble with language is that no one takes any notice of ‘should’.
In Latin, the adjective universus meant ‘whole, entire’ and, as a noun, ‘the whole world, everybody, the whole caboodle’. The English word multiverse is used in two quite different senses. In one sense, invented by William James, the novelist’s brother, the idea was to portray the universe as lacking order or a guiding power. ‘Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference, a multiverse, as one might call it, and not a universe,’ he wrote in 1895. He was no doubt bearing in mind the etymology of universus: uni- ‘characterised by one thing’ and versus (past participle of vertere) ‘turned together’, as if the cosmos were a wrung cloth or cream clotted by whisking.
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