As long as we’re talking about smoking pot and thinking about infinite regression, there’s a passage in Cosmos (second to the last paragraph in Chapter X) by Carl Sagan where he says, “There is an idea - strange, haunting, evocative - one of the most exquisite conjectures in science or religion. It is entirely undemonstrated; it may never be proved. But it stirs the blood. There is, we are told, an infinite hierachy of universes, so that an elementary particle, such as an electron, in our universe would, if penetrated, reveal itself to be an entire closed universe. Within it, organized into the local equivalent of galaxies and smaller structures, are an immense number of other, much tinier elementary particles, which are themselves universes at the next level, and so on forever - an infinite downward regression, universes within universes, endlessly. And upward as well. Our familiar universe of galaxies and stars, planets and people, would be a single elementary particle in the next universe up, the first step of another infinite regress.”
My thought after reading this was that this reminded me of something. It reminded me of the scene in the movie Animal House where people are sitting around smoking pot and discussing this theory. I wondered if Sagan smoked a lot of pot. As it happens, he did:
Incidentally, the theory above is sometimes called the theory of subatomic universes, although this could get confused with the idea of subatomic particles. One famous short story where it’s used is “He Who Shrank” by Henry Hasse:
The term isn’t used in that story, but it’s used, for instance, in this interview: