överse

Överse is a speculative cosmological concept that describes a meta-reality composed of many discrete universes or realms, collectively forming an archipelago within a larger structure. In överse, each island universe is treated as a separate domain with its own physical laws, constants, and initial conditions, potentially causally disconnected from neighboring islands. The term emphasizes locality and isolation within a broader cosmos, rather than a single, uniform space or a simple collection of connected worlds.

Etymology and usage: The word is a neologism that blends the diacritic ö with the word verse, invoking the image of separate islands of reality within a sea of possibilities. It is used primarily in speculative fiction, philosophy, and thought experiments to explore how reality might be organized if countless self-contained universes existed side by side, sometimes with hypothetical means of connection that do not imply direct empirical access.

Structure and variants: Överse envisions organizational patterns such as archipelagos of universes, where each island can differ markedly in physics and constants. Some models posit mechanisms for rare or indirect links between islands—via higher-dimensional pathways, informational overlaps, or computational overlays—while others keep universes completely isolated. The boundaries between islands are often assumed to be robust, though some theories allow transient or probabilistic interactions.

Reception and significance: In discourse, överse serves as a tool to examine questions of contingency, observability, and the limits of scientific inference. It is largely theoretical and not empirically testable with current methods, and it coexists with related ideas such as the multiverse, megaverse, or omniverse in contemporary speculation.

See also: multiverse, omniverse, cosmology, philosophy of science, speculative fiction.