‘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. Earlier, James had come up with nulliverse, for ‘a chaos’. He simply asserted this, with no evidence that things went differently in far parts of the universe.
A more recent meaning of multiverse was born in science fiction (dear old Michael Moorcock coining the word in 1963, aged 24). It was then adopted in all seriousness by physicists who thought lots of universes could be begotten by quantum events, or even connected by wormholes. I regard much of this as the last refuge of a scoundrel: positing entities beyond need. (Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem is how Ockham’s razor was sharpened 700 years ago.) I don’t deny a possible bifurcation of time. But with as many bunches of such multiverses as you fancied, I’d still prefer to call the whole collection the universe.
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