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Whole Sort of General Mish Mash
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash (WSOGMM) is a fictional concept in physics and cosmology from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, mentioned in Mostly Harmless. The Guide describes the WSOGMM as a way of understanding the sum of parallel universes in creation (in this context, creation is best described to a casual observer as spacetime). The theory of WSOGMM states that parallel universes are not parallel as such but rather each universe is simply a quantum physical perception of the same construct, which is the WSOGMM.
The last version of the Guide, a bird evocative of The Raven, gives a description of the Mish Mash to Arthur Dent's daughter Random. Though most factual information to do with the subject of parallel universes is incomprehensible to most beings under the rank of Advanced God, it can be understood better if the observer accepts these facts: everything in the WSOGMM moves in one direction in the first dimension, two directions in the second dimension, four directions in the third dimension and, unless with time travel, in one direction in the related but tangential fourth dimension, otherwise known as time.
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The fifth dimension (and, it is implied, every other dimension up to the twenty-second) is actually an axis of probability that makes up the Mish Mash. Any multiverse in creation is actually a location in the fifth dimension on. To an observer, a certain universe functions alone, but it's proven that if something is introduced simultaneously into every dimension (such as the bird version of The Guide was as a marketing ploy), an action on that object can affect the entire Mish Mash. In the final chapter of Mostly Harmless, when Earth is destroyed by the Vogons and the bird dies with it, the Earth is destroyed in all other universes—finally removed from the WSOGMM.
It's mentioned briefly that the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash, according to its own theory that creation is not the universe or time but a construct of probability, doesn't exist, and is merely a retro-hypothetical way of looking at it if it did. This self-cancelling out is a common theme in Douglas Adams' work, as seen in Life, the Universe and Everything, where it's mentioned that the technology needed to invent time travel is only attainable with the use of time travel.
