Hertog

Casanova Volume 1: Luxuria, the trade edition which collects the first seven issues of Matt Fractions sci-fi espionage adventure, begins with a series of three epigraphs culled from varied corners of text. From hard science, to Russian literature, to para-literature the variance of the quotations are quite representative of the work that follows. This is certainly due to the themes they address (multiple universes, nihilism, generational malaise, bullshit, etc...) but also to the variance itself. The distended texture, effortlessly created by this marriage of pop-culture, low-culture, high-culture, snake-oil-science, is what helps define the comic as a post-modern pastiche, fully aware of its surroundings, its fathers and its hedonism.

What follows are brief discussions of the cited texts, based on primarily on quotations.

"Quantum mechanics forbids a single history" Thomas Hertog


"In physics, quantum mechanics is the study of the relationship between energy quanta (radiation) and matter, in particular that between valence shell electrons and photons. Quantum mechanics is a fundamental and necessary branch of physics with wide applications in both experimental and theoretical physics. Quantum theory generalizes all classical theories, including mechanics, electromagnetism (except general relativity), and provides accurate descriptions for many previously unexplained phenomena such as black body radiation and stable electron orbits.The effects of quantum mechanics are typically not observable on macroscopic scales, but become evident at the atomic and subatomic level."

In 2006, Steven Hawkings and colleague Thomas Hertog published a paper that claimed the universe:

had no unique beginning. Instead, they argue, it began in just about every way imaginable (and maybe some that aren't). Out of this profusion of beginnings, the vast majority withered away without leaving any real imprint on the Universe we know today....

But Hawking and Hertog say that the countless 'alternative worlds' of string theory may actually have existed. We should picture the Universe in the first instants of the Big Bang as a superposition of all these possibilities, they say; like a projection of billions of movies played on top of one another.

But in the first instants of the Big Bang, there existed a superposition of ever more different versions of the Universe, instead of a unique history. And most crucially, Hertog says that "our current Universe has features frozen in from this early quantum mixture".

In other words, some of these alternative histories have left their imprint behind.