The imagination can easily create other worlds in fantasy. But do such worlds really exist? It seems that we have no way of knowing, unless perhaps there is an ultimate structure to the whole of all possibilities. We have already seen that the realm of possibilities is limited or bounded by the extremes of Alpha and Omega. Are there other limits? Indeed the whole of infinite possibilities has a distinct shape which can be understood. In fact there are boundaries in every direction of possibility, and such boundaries shape and guide the flow of time in our own universe. They influence and determine our entire lives. 

If we know what is possible we can determine what is probable. We all intuitively know this. If we could create a map of all possibilities such a map should tell us what worlds are probable and what worlds are improbable or impossible. We know that what is possible determines what actually happens in our own universe, but we only vaguely understand why. The physicist Ludwig Boltzmann was the first to imagine that an overall set of possibilities has a shape and structure that controls what happens in time when he developed an advanced theory of thermodynamics in 1868.

In his now famous book, A Brief History of Time, the physicist Stephen Hawking uses a puzzle to explain the basic principles behind Boltzmann's statistical version of the second law. Hawking explains how the greater number of disordered states influences events. Note that each possible pattern or arrangement is called a state, and the overall realm of possibilities is called state space.