Can spaces overlap? This is somewhat of a break from a growing logical ploy on my part. But consider the question anyway.
One of the reasons I enjoy thinking about space is that space is, in a word, everywhere. We can go from the designed to the natural space, the small to the large space, the interior to the external space.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “But still.”
I say “but still” nothing.
There are certainly many sciences that treat space empirically. Physics and chemistry, for example. And there are certainly numerous theories that attempt to describe physical reality and speculate by drawing descriptions of the possibilities of those theories. M-theory, Smolin’s fecund notion, Tegmark, and others. Critique for all this, of course, has to do with whether some of these notions can be tested. Under what conditions might the fecund universe theory be tested as this depends on the phenomenon of black holes and what happens after they collapse.
I’m smart enough to know that fiction is not a means of making valid, empirical predictions about the physical nature of space, but fiction has proved a wonderful method of dramatizing based on speculation and prediction about said space. The representations of space in fiction might indeed be accurate metaphors of sound knowledge or sound predictive insight.
I find it fascinating, for example, to consider the notion that the objects, events, and phenomenon of other universes might poke their way into our own. What would be the possibilities? What if that person you’re talking to on the phone is really a being from another universe and it just so happens that you have the same name and appearance as the person she knows in that other universe and that the timeline she’s on runs near parallel with your own and ever so often this person leaks or pokes into your universe. The reason that this is not problematic is that you so closely resemble her friend that the difference escapes her. Thus, when you’re at lunch with Betty or Jean and you say, “Lucy has always been just a tad bit off” you are actually making a scientific observation.
In another case, you drive by a phone booth. Maybe you’ve entered the phone and made a call. But this phone booth is often a phone of another universe, and this is why when you try to phone Lucy, sometimes you get the incorrect number. Most of the time, however, this phone booth is “of your world” and works as ordered.
Another way of expressing this is to consider a room in an anonymous house. You’ve never seen this room but can imagine it. It’s a bathroom with a shower. The room is dark and clean. The people who live in this house are at work and don’t know what goes on at their place when they’re out. It’s fun to imagine what might go on there, what might be happening beyond the typical: it’s being robbed or a wire is sparking behind a wall or from beneath the refrigerator, a mouse emerges–these would be too typical. In this case, and often, a man appears in the bathroom accompanied by the enormous forces of multiuniverse connectivity. These enormous forces take the form of heat energy, distortions of spacetime, and strange acoustic disruptions, which may or may not be dangerous in proximity. One moment the room is quiet (or we suppose such, as we really don’t know what goes on in a room when no observer can act as witness). The next moment, a man from another universe suddenly appears in the shower, glimpsed momentary and engaged in whatever he’s doing in his own universe at the time: running, dancing, eating, speaking on the phone, or, most likely, installing wall paper. Light bursts in the room and the man appears. He appears to be laying wallpaper. Then, just as abruptly, he withdraws, and the room is quiet once more, still and clean and dark.
The physics of this is beyond us. But we also don’t know whether the man knows he’s appearing in a shower stall. We don’t know whether he will always be transported back to his own universe. We also don’t know the likelihood of the man’s appearance at the same moment that one or more of the inhabitants are taking a shower, but it would be fun to imagine what would happen if space and time worked in favor of such an occurrence.
