A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Multiverse: How to Understand Timelines in the MCU, DC Universe, Star Trek and More
Hugh Everett III is widely credited for developing the theory at Princeton in the 1950s. The multiverse has cropped up in science fiction and comic books ever since, and it’s most often been employed in time-travel stories like “Back to the Future,” where a timeline has been split or changed and needs to be repaired.But the head-squeezing metaphysics of parallel timelines intersecting and influencing each other has largely kept the idea on the fringe of mainstream popular culture.Then, ’round about 2016, the idea that we are “living in the worst timeline” began to take a rather fearsome hold on social media, accelerating in 2020 with the COVID pandemic.