MULTIVERSE noun (muhl-ti-vurs)

noun
1. a hypothetical collection of identical or diverse universes, including our own.


Quotes

Multiverse proponents advocate the idea that there may exist innumerable other universes, some of them with totally different physics and numbers of spatial dimensions; and that you, I and everything else may exist in countless copies.
--*Heinrich Päs,*"Quantum Monism Could Save the Soul of Physics," Scientific American, March 5, 2019


Ten days before he died, Stephen Hawking sent one more written insight out into the cosmos—a paper, co-written with physicist*Thomas Hertog*of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium,*tackling the problem of a multiverse.
--*Sarah Kaplan,*"One of Stephen Hawking's final scientific acts: Tackling the multiverse," Washington Post, May 3, 2018



Origin

Multiverse, a combination of the common prefix multi- and (uni)verse, nowadays means “a hypothetical collection of identical or diverse universes, ours included,” a sense first suggested in 1952 by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961). Multiverse, however, was coined by the American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910). Multiverse to James was an alternative to or an opposite of universe and meant “the universe imagined as lacking order, unity, or a single ruling and guiding power.” James used multiverse in a lecture “Is Life Worth Living?” in 1895.