Occupy This: Humor versus Reality

Abstract

Lately, scientists have been suggesting, in all seriousness, that our common-sense universe may be only one of an infinite multiverse of intersecting alternative realities, albeit the only one we can know anything about at all. I would like to propose that the ever-abundant productions of imagination—art, poetry, music and the like—are our real means of experiencing those other possible or impossible worlds. Imagination easily transcends time and space. Sometimes it yields material results—an idea for a space rocket leads to men landing on the moon, for example. More often, the outcome is amusement, though it's hard to say what's so mere about that.