Welcome back. It's me your favorite neighborhood podcaster and I'm here to ruin every Marvel movie for you in one hour.

I am, I'm really, I promise that I'm joking here. I am, I'm actually not trying to spoil your fun. I don't want to rain on anybody's parade.

I go to Marvel movies just like every other guy. I, you know, like every other person in America, I shell out my 20 bucks or whatever and sitting the iMacs theater and I watch like Spider-Man,

the third Spider-Man 3 Spider-Man cubed or whatever. And so I do not want to like disparage anybody for doing that or say that you shouldn't go do it. I don't know, it seems fine.

But I also think that as cultural products as one of our most successful cultural ventures, there's massive successful work of pop art.

I think that the Marvel Cinematic Universe deserves attention and critique. I think fair is fair. If you're going to make stories that grab, you know, an entire nation and the entire world, then we should take them seriously and ask what kind of ideas they're acting out.

And so one of the things that I want to focus on in this episode is this concept of the multiverse. This is a podcast about the history of Western culture and philosophy and the Marvel Cinematic Universe has basically placed in front of millions of people this ancient idea that there are what the Greeks would have called many worlds, many cosmoe or cosmoses.

The idea that where we live, the space that we operate and move through is just one universe, operating according to certain rules and there are perhaps infinitely many others where different rules apply.

And not only is this being resurrected on screen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it has also received this sort of new life in the field of physics.

So scientists are actually engaged in highly technical debates about whether we really do live in a multiverse and how we could ever possibly know.

But let me just read you from the maybe most direct pop expression of this idea, which is from the introduction of Marvel's What If. This is on Netflix, it's an animated series, and each episode is basically an alternate version of some movie or story that they've already put out on the big screen.

And yet like Captain America, but what if it was actually Captain America's girlfriend who got the powers or whatever, you know, what if Dr. Strange sort of became evil and tried to go back in time and rescue girlfriend, all this stuff.

Here's the introduction to that show. It's very short. Time, space, reality. It's more than a linear path. It's a prison of endless possibility where a single choice can branch out into infinite realities creating alternate worlds from the ones you know.

I am the watcher. I am your guide through these vast new realities. Follow me and ponder the question. What if?

That's the clearest, most direct possible statement of it, but basically every Marvel property with some small exceptions, every major Marvel property since Avengers Endgame when they brought the whole big conflict to its ostensible conclusion.

Every Marvel property since then has in some way been founded on this idea that there are multiple dimensions or multiple universes in which some of the things that happened in the old movies either didn't happen or being revised or, you know, maybe they were only happening in one corner and there was other stuff happening in this much larger scale.

Spider-Man, I call it Spider-Man cubed, but the latest Spider-Man into the Spider-verse or whatever with all three Spider-Man, you know, Toby Muayer, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland. Loki is another big one. And of course, what if all operated according to this principle of the multiverse now?

I am not a scientist, so I am going to try to explain the science of the multiverse to you. In some brief and outline, you know, sketchy kind of terms. And hopefully that will be accurate. But what I'm really going to argue is that the multiverse is not a scientific idea because it's inherently unverifiable.

If there are other universes, they are, they don't have any impact upon ours. And so there's no way to empirically verify, according to our imperia, which is that Greek word of experience, right? There's no way to get empirical verification of the multiverse. So what it really is is a philosophical and indeed a quasi theological idea.

So I'm going to critique it on that level as an idea that has existed throughout thousands of years of history and that has certain consequences both in philosophy and in art. Let's get started.

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