From now on, each time @su-SPEC-t posts a non-contest writing prompt, I'll write a NON-fiction essay picking apart the same narrative theme. I'll cite examples from spec fic and broader geek storytelling to back up my points.
DISCLAIMER: I'll try to...
The most basic version of physicist Erwin Schrödinger's famous thought experiment goes like this: you put a healthy cat inside a closed box with a deadly but stable poison, which may or may not kill the cat, depending on whether it gets released. Unless the box is opened, there's no reasonable way to determine whether the cat is alive or dead. So while the box remains shut, we understand the cat to be alive and dead. Zombie jokes aside, without any reliable way to prove one state or the other, we treat it as both, at the same time.
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So how does this relate to storytelling? For writers of fiction, especially long-running sagas, canon and continuity usually function like narrative proofs, establishing one reality and scrapping (or at least marginalizing) other ones. However, like Schrödinger's cat, there are several narrative tropes for having one's fictional cake and eating it too. One of these tropes is the Mirror Universe (MU).
Days of Future Past Imperfect
But first, let's set a few ground rules, shall we? Not all parallel realities are necessarily MUs. To qualify, both (or all) realities have to include fundamental similarities that only diverge at specific points in time, in the same way that Schrödinger's cat is a known quantity before it enters the box.
Strangely enough, some of the most famous examples of Mirror Universes happen in fictional work that isn't typically regarded as speculative or even genre-based. Case in point: that evergreen Christmas film, It's A Wonderful Life, which depicts realities with and without businessman George Bailey's influence on the residents of Bedford Falls. Another example: the Emmy Award-winning "Remedial Chaos Theory" episode of comedy show Community, with the result of a mundane dice roll creating seven different alternate realities (one of which is a homage to a pioneering MU tale: the Star Trek Original Series episode, "Mirror, Mirror").
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Typically, as in the case of It's A Wonderful Life, the mirror universe will feature the same characters with their personalities shifted or modified, often as a result of different (often worse) circumstances. My personal favorite example is the dystopian alternate 1985, reshaped by Biff Tannen in Back To The Future 2. (Yes, my age is showing.)
