A few days after I was asked to contribute an essay to the Forum, one of the editors asked if I could write about my experience of being back at Hillsdale as a professor. In trying to meet this request, it is tempting to title this piece “There and Back Again,” but I think the published title is more appropriate.

Perhaps a good place to start is where the first four years ended. Although 2017 was not that long ago, you might think it was a different era. The ground for Christ Chapel had not been broken yet, Facebook was the top social media site next to Twitter, and The Palace Café was still in business… But really, it is not worth reminiscing about the “glory days” because the Internet could give you all of this information (scroll down far enough on a Facebook feed and you will even have pictures!). To cut to the chase, returning to Hillsdale has been wonderful though maybe not in the way my student reader imagines. Sure, it is nice to return to a familiar setting. Yes, it is great to support the mission of my alma mater. And too, there are many old friends I now have the honor of calling my colleagues. I am blessed to experience all these things, but that is not the whole story. It might be better worth my reader’s time to explain something less obvious and more mysterious.

The best description that I can think of for returning to Hillsdale College is to say that at some point in graduate school I fell through a portal and ended up in a parallel universe. It is as if the Hillsdale I knew as a student still exists somewhere in the multiverse while the Hillsdale that I now teach for is the present universe that I find myself in – Christ Chapel is a reminder that this Hillsdale is somehow “different.” It is silly. Of course, it is the same Hillsdale then as it is now! Yet, the sensation conveys more regarding my interior change than anything external. When I walk around campus and come across a spot that triggers an old memory (like the Quad or a nook in the library), my mind is not drawn to what I see before me so much as what I saw years ago. That spot, wherever it is, is where my attention has been drawn. The location I presently look at seems like a copy of the other. 

Somehow, my mind is more willing to accept two copies of universe rather than grasp that I have returned to a location that I have been to before. The strangest part of this is that my mind does not alert me to the existence of multiverse in every situation. For example, when I leave my office for the evening, I do not sense that I have left a world behind and encounter a new world the next day. It truly seems like the same office day after day. And yet, when I recall the room that my office used to be during my days as a student, the haunting notion of the multiverse returns. But what is so different? What is the passage of a few hours compared to a few years as far as memory is concerned? My short-term memory is not the best so it cannot be the level of detail that makes my memory of the room yesterday seem like the same one I am in today and the room five years ago a completely independent universe located somewhere in inter-dimensional space. Something else must be behind the multiverse.  

It is more than the memories that make me aware of the multiverse, it is also my association of certain locations around campus. After four years, I accumulated a few favorite study spots (most notably the Physics Lounge). Back in the universe I remember, I felt a certain sense of belonging to those spots. Even stranger, it does not even have to be my study spots or any location that I personally frequented. Different places across campus belong to the people I knew back in the universe I came from. Now, they are occupied by unfamiliar faces with maybe just enough of a resemblance as the multiverse allows (or maybe I am seeing the younger siblings of people I knew, but that’s too mundane of an explanation). When I see a table in the dining hall with a group of strangers laughing around it just like my old classmates, I think of David when he laments (at least in my universe): “As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more” (Ps. 103:15-16). Perhaps the Psalmist was on to something. This idea that a place “knows” what used to occupy it seems to be a part of my memory, too. My memory seems to hold not only the physical appearance of the College five years ago, but also my impression of it five years ago. The universe of five years ago that my mind struggles to reconcile with the present is made up of more than physical arrangements, it also contains stories, histories, and myths that shaped my imagination at the time. But now they are gone. The heroes and legends of the day have graduated. The drama of tests, homework, friends that so preoccupied that world are not there. A new state of mind has taken its place. And yet, the old state is not discarded. Rather, it is given its own world within my head. 

Hillsdale is not the only place that I am reminded of the multiverse quietly multiplying in my brain. I get the same feeling when I drive by my old high school. My parents have stayed in the same house that I grew up in for nearly 30 years. When I walk into my old bedroom during the holidays, I am reminded of a multiplicity of universes about worlds left behind long ago. Each season of childhood and adolescence is just another branch of the multiverse.

I have started to understand why the concept of a multiverse is so appealing to contemporary storytelling; it is true. As a physicist, it is not surprising to imagine other dimensions (string theory tries to postulate up to 11 dimensions, some of them literally “rolled up” so small that you never notice). Yet, it never occurred to me until recently that perhaps memory serves as another “dimension” to reality. I am not alone in this. St. Augustine refers to the “fields and palaces” of memory in his Confessions. Memory seems to hold so much, and yet this “vast and boundless chamber” is not quite another space in the usual sense. It seems to hold so much more, and Augustine understood this too. It would be a treatise to go much further than this so I will end by noting that the multiverse is not such a bizarre concept as science fiction makes it out to be. Rather than a description of hyperdimensional spacetime or the collapse of quantum mechanical probabilities, the multiverse seems to be the spiritual activity of a person on a journey through life.  

Michael Tripepi is assistant professor of physics at Hillsdale College.