Maybe Patriarch Pavle and Saint Sava look with concern (or maybe not) at the wandering and unworthy behavior of the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church towards the student protests and, in general, the people who are looking for justice for 15 minutes every day, but that is why Galileo Galilei and Giordano Bruno have reason to be satisfied that, along with other miracles, the Church sought solace and salvation from domestic politics in physics: the project of a new, Copernican one science, which these pioneers began 400 years ago and paid dearly for with personal sacrifice, received unexpected theological recognition when the SPC began to refer to string theory in its teachings and justifications.
The church's appeal to parallel universes, from the meeting at Autokomanda to today, has become part of the folklore of the months-long student protest, along with pumping, bloody hand, Ćaci, cobras and a million versions of the song "Za milion godina". Namely, in the author's text "Parallel universes or the contribution of student protests to modern science", which was published at the end of January on the SPC website by Dušan Stokanović, the manager of the Information and Publishing Institution of the SPC and which was reported by numerous traditional media, it is stated that the students proved scientific dilemmas about parallel universes, which caused a wave of cynical and, as is our custom, comical comments about the Church, a series of denials, the official fence of certain leaders, articles about Stokanović alleged corrupt dealings with the show "Religious Calendar", but also support and even subsequent interpretations, one of which was carefully tried to be explained by priest Stevan Jovanović, introducing the new term "mutually", but in vain... The Church sank deeper and deeper into another, shall we say, parallel universe. As the days progressed, the church official Stokanović's excursion into a metaphor from modern physics multiplied, and the multiverse became part of the political arsenal, so every now and then someone, the opposition, the government, the non-governmental sector, Europe or the Church, places someone in another universe.
What is it all about? The idea of a larger number of universes, or, more beautifully, the cosmos, is said to have first occurred to Anaximander of Ionia in the 6th century BC, a trace of which has been recorded in the commentaries of Simplicius of Cilicia. There is, however, no reason to think that even long before this great student of the famous Thales of Miletus, someone did not come up with that idea, between thinking about the hunter-gatherer life and the domestication of nature. The next person to breathe life into this idea will be no less than Erwin Schrödinger, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, the fundamental theory in modern physics. In a lecture in Dublin in 1952, Schrödinger put forward a "seemingly crazy idea," as he reportedly put it, trying to explain that his equation explained seemingly different histories, but could be thought of as histories or worlds occurring simultaneously.
Schrödinger's cat
Namely, quantum physics as the science of the microworld - the alien human mind - which has been firmly confirmed by experiments and which, starting from the question of what the world is made of and how it functions, developed in a real intellectual revolution in the twenties and thirties of the 20th century, opened up a series of unusual dilemmas that really seem "crazy" in our world. For example, a particle can be described by equations that say that it travels like a wave, that it behaves as if it passes through two apertures at the same time, that its state and its history are a mixture of passing through both one and the other aperture, until we want to see which of the apertures it really passed through, so we close one, and when it passes through the other, the so-called "collapse of the wave function" occurs. Such is the famous thought experiment with Schrödinger's cat - it is both alive and dead until you open the box and check its condition. Then it's always one or the other, which is a distinction that escapes the top of the SPC these days.
In this way, the matter is seen in the dominant, so-called Copenhagen interpretation quantum mechanics. However, there are other interpretations of the same equations and the same problem, and one is called many-worlds, that is, the interpretation of multiple worlds. In it, all outcomes and all histories - that the particle passed through one or the other opening - are equally possible because they take place in different universes. In the banal understanding of this strange idea, it would mean that every time you choose something, the universe splits into one choice and the other, and then everything that follows takes place in parallel cosmoses - for example, the government fulfilled the students' demands in one, and decided to show them only as such in the other, and life continues in both cosmoses.
So far, there is no experimental evidence that this interpretation is acceptable, so from the point of view of physics, it is simply just an interesting story, quite convenient for metaphors in the accounts of the church fathers with their people, but it cannot be understood as exact knowledge about the world. It is similar with the famous string theory. This once extremely popular theory is based on the idea of ultimate symmetries that are the basis of everything in the universe. Namely, according to the string theory, elementary particles (of which protons, neutrons and the entire material world are made) are just different vibrations of objects called "strings", they are just their different appearances or emanations, but they are actually the same and unique, just as the forces we see and feel as different are actually one and the same "unified" force.
Extravagant and supported by very demanding mathematics, string theory attracted the most brilliant physicists of the time at the end of the 20th century. One of its pioneers, Edward Witten, said that "string theory is a piece of 21st century physics that happened to arise in the 20th century." However, as physics from the aforementioned Galileo until today is primarily an exact science and consists of theories that have been proven by experiment, string theory found itself in trouble as the 21st century approached and at its beginning because it became increasingly clear not only that there are no experimental confirmations, but also that it is questionable whether experiments can be made that would prove it with our current knowledge and technology. This gradually pushed this theory into the background, as well as the idea of multiverses, which developed in the same spirit.
GOOD AND EVIL
"If we ask, bearing in mind the sensitive dependence of life on the details of physics, why forces and particles have the properties we perceive, the following answer emerges as possible: those properties vary drastically throughout the multicosmos, their properties differ in other cosmos," says the popular British physicist and author Brian Greene in the book Elegant cosmos (Helix, 2009). Green associated the idea of the multiverse with the controversial anthropocentric principle (that everything in nature existed and that everything happened in order to eventually create man) and he is not the only one who sees the multiverse as the simplest possible explanation of the world. A multiverse is, strictly speaking, a hypothetical set of all universes. Each of them individually would mean everything that exists and makes existence, space, time, matter. According to the idea of physicist Max Tegmark, four classes of multiverses can be distinguished: extensions of our universe, universes with different values of fundamental physical constants, universes of multiple worlds of quantum mechanics and, additionally, the ultimate assembly devised by Tegmark himself. On the other hand, Brian Greene has proposed nine classes of multiverses, though he insists that our own best explains it. "Things are the way they are in our cosmos, because if they were different, we wouldn't be able to perceive them," says Green.
In our everyday life, however, not all possibilities with multiverses have been exhausted. There is something in untruths (which must be denied). With all the noise and interpretations that originated from the ancient Anaximander, few people reminded of the fact that the mentioned Dušan Stokanović in his metaphor with parallel universes, similar to Brian Greene, shows that there are different classes of students, one pleasing to God who goes to the Temple (then when it is not locked) and the other who violently invades the Serbian Motherland. The latter, which Stokanović says "with the most shameless insults" defrauded and terminated the Svetosava Academy, is in itself the most shameless forgery.
No one forcibly interrupted the Svetosava sermon in Matica Srpska. On the contrary. If you ignored the details of that case in the sea of events, there was talk of an attack on the vanity of the president of this institution, and the outcome was exactly the opposite of what Stokanović states, namely the students were forcibly taken out of the building, with appropriate strangulation. Of course, no one was responsible for that violence. More details: a group of students of the Faculty of Philosophy from Novi Sad tried to perform a creative performance during the speech and, as a reminder of the fall of the canopy that killed fifteen people, read a decades-old poem by the president of Matica Srpska, Dragan Stanić. Stanić's reaction followed in the form of an order to evict the students from the building, and then, despite the fact that there are recordings, with the cooperation of Novi Sad's "Dnevnik", a reporter from RTV Vojvodina and accompanying tabloids, he produced a media frenzy against the students, with a series of unbearably banal and water-stained "Letters to students" that the Belgrade press broadcast as a "call for dialogue".
You may be wondering who is there in the parallel universe, but the SPC official, if he hasn't noticed it already (although he has an insight into string theory), could also use the concept of the so-called baryon asymmetry, the disturbed ratio of matter and antimatter in our cosmos. This asymmetry can be explained by the controversial hypothesis of to the twin universe or the universe in the mirror, in which the particles are the antiparticles, the devil is the lamb, and the plus is the minus. Evil is, of course, good. Because this is a crucial question in this story, for which knowledge of quantum mechanics is convenient, but not necessary: the citizens of Serbia these days understand very well how to distinguish transcendent good from ontological evil. One is spreading through Serbia at the expense of the other, in the same, one and only cosmos.
