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Frederick Forsyth's 1971 thriller The Day of the Jackal tells the story of a fiendishly clever assassin who almost brings down Charles DeGaulle. Through a combination of elaborate planning, ingenious subterfuge, and great skill, the Jackal manages to get himself and a high-powered rifle into position to take a single shot at his target. At the last minute the target moves and the bullet buries itself in the ground, unnoticed by the cheering crowd. The 1973 Hollywood version of the novel, starring Edward Fox as the clever, elusive Jackal, was faithful to Forsyth's original scenario of ingenuity and cunning.
The 1997 remake, starring Bruce Willis, was another story. Gone was the elegant, understated assassin. The new Jackal goes after his target—this time the First Lady—with so much firepower that the assembled crowd flees in terror as shattered brick and glass from the front of the building rain down on them. In fact, so great is the carnage that a casual observer would have had some difficulty in determining the Jackal's exact target.
As the saying goes, there is more than one way to skin a cat. If you want to assassinate a highly protected figure you need copious quantities of either finesse or firepower—finesse to do it once and get it right, or firepower to blast away recklessly and eventually hit the target. Finesse and firepower often define the choice between means to a given end. You can write Hamlet with the finesse of a Shakespeare or the firepower of an infinite stadium of monkeys typing randomly; you can solve political problems with the finesse of diplomacy or the firepower of cruise missiles; and you can explain the marvelous design of our universe by the finesse of a wise creator or the firepower of some mindless cosmic machine extravagantly belching out alternative realities, some of which have the ingenious design of this one, but most of which do not—collateral damage on a cosmic scale.
Such alternative realities have long been the stuff of science fiction; after all, who is not interested in the question of whether "our" reality is the only possibility? Are there alternative versions of ourselves in a parallel universe, new and improved? Could we find a way to bring these alternative realities into this familiar one? Could we, for example, freeze ourselves and get thawed out at some later time and live again, perhaps in a century when there were no more reality tv shows?
Speculation about alternative realities is hardly new. Democritus and the atomist philosophers of classical Greece were convinced that the universe contained an infinity of particles, combining in an infinity of random ways and producing every imaginable and unimaginable possibility. Rejecting all this cosmic firepower, Aristotle bequeathed to the Western tradition a compact, tidy, solitary, high-finesse universe with the Earth firmly anchored in the center of things.
This lasted until Copernicus unhooked the Earth and promoted it to the heavens with the other planets. Now that the Earth was a planet like the others, speculation about alternative realities was unleashed. Thus began a long-running debate over "the plurality of worlds." If there are planets besides Earth—so some argued—then they must be inhabited, for God makes nothing in vain, and empty planets would surely be a waste. Others contended that the Earth was uniquely favored in God's creation. The modern inheritors of this question continue to debate the likelihood of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
But what if the ante is upped? What if we envision not simply varieties of intelligent life within the almost inconceivable vastness of our universe but rather multiple universes? Until recently, such speculation has been limited almost entirely to science fiction. But the current crop of multiple universes has proceeded not from the fevered imagination of novelists but from leading scientists, whose theories have been expounded in legitimate scientific journals and popularized in countless science magazines.
