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Is the Multiverse Where Originality Goes to Die? | The New Yorker

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In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges published “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a short story in which a spy travels to the home of an English scholar. There they discuss an odd book by the spy’s great-grandfather, Ts’ui Pên. Rather than follow a single plot, the book aims to explore countless story lines. “In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives he chooses one and eliminates the others,” the scholar says. “In the fiction of the almost inextricable Ts’ui Pên he chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.” Borges devoted most of his story to explaining the complicated idea that many different realities can coexist in a mazelike web of time lines. “This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time,” the scholar goes on. “We do not exist in the majority of these times; i

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