On our honeymoon we traveled to Italy. During our tour of Florence, we stumbled upon the fingers of Galileo nestled in a bell-shaped jar at the city’s science museum. They were posed, pointing up as if at the stars that he observed. As we reached the front of the line, like so many other people ahead of us we point and murmur about the great man of science in reverent awe, except for me who wouldn’t miss the chance to say irreverently, “Ow,” in my best extra-terrestrial impersonation.

Galileo had started the renaissance of modern science that continued through Newton, Einstein, Wheeler and DeWitt, and countless others. Physicists began looking further out into the stars and also deeper within our physiology to discover more about the makeup of the universe. Theories expanded; some bordering on the fantastical, barely able to be proven given the limitation of our tools, techniques, and minds. Where one theory might end, another one begins, while still another one tries to smooth out the gaps of knowledge in between the other two.

It began with the idea that the Earth revolved around the Sun, then the discovery that the Earth wasn’t flat, followed by the discovery of gravity. Newton, through the motion of apples falling from a tree, published the theory of gravity; explaining the motion of the moon and the planets. There were still gaps in this theory that Einstein helped fill by defining that the medium that transmits gravity is space itself as seen by how the Earth is kept in orbit because it moves across an environment curved due to the Sun’s presence.

Space was soon defined within three dimensions through length, width, depth; left, right, back, forth and up, down. Time became the fourth dimension. Scientists and theorists soon began to debate the existence of other dimensions. The first four were easily visible and measurable, but what about other, smaller dimensions that are in the microscopic depths of space?

Math and the sciences were never my strong suit in school. As linear as math was, I could never see the pattern that it presented. Even as I try to organize these thoughts on paper I’m annoyed by the limited knowledge I have and the attention I can give before I have to shift focus due to the pressure building behind my eyes.

Even now I find every science documentary fascinating as they delve in and dissect the mysteries of the universe, especially around the presence of mathematics in nature. These patterns tend to repeat enough that ultimately they could be replicable; taking the complexities of the universe and explaining it at a fundamental level. So much so that the idea of replicating the universe and creating one that is almost completely indistinguishable from our own seems possible. It’s a matter of knowing the defined laws of physics—gravity, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, nuclear forces—as well as the undefined—wormholes, black holes, dark matter, matter-antimatter asymmetry—and identifying the relationships that tell you “by how much” and if you could create the same genesis conditions, you’ll create a universe with the same chemical, physiological, and biological makeup as our own.

A big piece of this puzzle is trying to pull ourselves out of the box we fit ourselves in by defining things like space and time. If we could forget those definitions when it comes to the universe, we could, in theory, enter a realm of dimensionless constants that would allow us to transcend the universe itself.

When I was little, on special occasions my dad would put on a record from his collection and turn up the volume for one special song that began with a helicopter landing. With the volume turned up to eleven, we would sit next to the speaker feeling the sound waves vibrate through us before the drums and electric guitar kicked in. Before I understood what math or science was I used to imagine that those sound waves had some sort of physicality to them as they passed through me and how we were surrounded by vibrations. Some you could feel, like through the speaker, while others weren’t as perceptival. It was this notion of a cosmic symphony; how once you dive in deep, past the microscopic level, past the idea of electrons, neutrons, protons, atoms and the subatomic, deeper until you’ve transcended all sense and all that’s left is an endless tapestry of vibrating strings composing what would eventually form itself into our universe.

Once you strip away the notion of God within the creation story, the randomness that formed the Earth is pretty complex and extremely random. Why do we find ourselves on this planet at this particular distance from the Sun, instead of the other planetary possibilities? Any closer to the Sun and our planet would be too hot for life to exist. Any further away and the planet is too cold. For some reason, Earth is disturbingly fine-tuned for life. If ours was the only cosmos created by the Big Bang, the randomness behind these life-friendly attributes would seem impossible. But if our reality allowed for the existence of a multiverse that contained an infinite amount of universes, more life-friendly ones could occur.

If you shuffle a deck of cards enough times, the same pattern will emerge. Whether that pattern emerged to form another distinctly different world with distinctly different humanoid creatures, or created a world exactly like Earth with humans exactly like us who continued along the same path and trajectory as the people that came before us is the next question.

Somewhere, in the far reaches of the infinite cosmos, there might be a galaxy that looks just like ours, with a planet just like ours, with a house that looks like mine, inhabited by someone who looks just like Veronica and me and Eleanor. If there is a multiverse that contains this outcome, then there are a variety of other outcomes dictated by the choices those doppelgängers made and the paths they took. With the multiverse laid out like a row of reflected selves, whenever one of us is faced with several courses of action, each version could take a path creating many distinct temporal dimensional differences and distinct histories in their part of the cosmos. With those possible choices and outcomes, the combination of all the courses taken throughout history would be innumerable, creating an infinite number of similar universes to ours as each moment of every sequence is explored.

Building a treehouse in our backyard, my dad and I were building the platform and my dad asked me to get out of the way and I did, tumbling off the side of the treehouse and down the wooden ladder. In this universe I fell to the bottom of the steps, my arm sliding in between the rungs and stopping myself with a wrenchful twisting of my shoulder. In another universe I fell to the ground, landing on my neck and paralyzing myself.

During a particularly rainy summer, our extended family was canoeing on what normally was a calm river. Due to excessive rainfall, the river flowed faster than usual and in weeks past had flooded, tumbling massive trees over the banks and creating a challenging obstacle course. At one point, as we tried to round the massive roots of a tree that laid on its side in the river, our canoe was pushed up against the root system and was sucked underneath the water, taking me with it. Uncles and cousins grounded their canoes and leapt into the water, running and splashing to get alongside our canoe to lift it out. By that point, my eight-year old self had grabbed hold of the roots climbing out of the water, clinging desperately as the current still tried to pull me under. In another universe, I probably had inhaled a lot of water by the time my uncles pulled me out to the rocky beach, failing to resuscitate me.

Somehow, if any of this is true, and the multiverse does exist with its randomness and complexity, somewhere in the far off cosmos I had found Veronica and Veronica had found me, and we were still together with Eleanor.