Suppose God took it into his head to make another world just like ours; if one is good, why wouldn't two be better? There's a lot he'd have to see to; dividing the light from the dark and the seas from the dry land would hardly make a start. He'd need to conjure up another Milky Way, for example, that's exactly counterpart to ours, and arrange the very same number of stars in the very same relative locations. There would have to be the same number of planets circling these stars as circle ours; and the same number of moons circling the planets . . . and so on down to the least significant particles of asteroidal debris. All of which he'd have to set moving, at just the right velocity, away from duplicates of all the other galaxies.

LRB 29 October 1998 | PDF Download