Characters:
Professor Quillibrace
Mr Blottisham
Miss Elowen Stray
Blottisham:
Many Worlds! At last, the universe obeys my every whim! Every possibility realised! Infinite splendour!
Quillibrace:
Infinite splendour is exhausting.
Elowen Stray:
But surely it’s elegant? No need to collapse anything—every choice becomes a world.
Blottisham:
Exactly! No more disappointment, no more waiting—everything occurs somewhere!
Quillibrace:
Except your imagination insists that it all matters simultaneously.
Blottisham:
It does! Every branch, every divergence—I want them all!
Quillibrace:
You want ontological overachievement.
Elowen Stray:
So the theory does not demand multiple worlds?
Quillibrace:
Not in the slightest. That’s a narrative patch. A way to avoid confronting a simple cut.
Blottisham:
But if we accept one world, then some possibilities fail. That is cruel!
Quillibrace:
It is disciplined. Reality is not obliged to satisfy drama.
Blottisham:
So all those worlds are fiction?
Quillibrace:
Fiction intended to console human impatience.
Elowen Stray:
So Many Worlds is a very polite hallucination.
Blottisham:
I prefer to call it cosmic generosity!
Quillibrace:
Generosity requires someone to benefit. This is simply imagination outpacing necessity.
Blottisham:
But the mathematics allows it!
Quillibrace:
It allows description of outcomes relative to cuts. That is not an instruction to multiply the universe.
Elowen Stray:
So we invent worlds to avoid accepting the sufficiency of one?
Quillibrace:
Exactly. A most extravagant avoidance of simplicity.
Blottisham:
Then the trouble with Many Worlds…
Quillibrace:
…is that it treats description as obligation.
Elowen Stray:
And mistakes narrative exuberance for reality.
Blottisham:
The universe is stingy, then.
Quillibrace:
Only with your indulgences. Otherwise, impeccably generous to physics.
(Blottisham sighs, imagining a cosmos too vast to ever inspect, while Elowen smiles at the economy of the actual.)
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