Many Worlds

Shine sunlight through a prism. The result is a spectrum of colors. As schoolchildren learn, a prism diffracts white light into red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, plus all the shades and gradations that are created as each color merges into and becomes the next color. How many colors are created? The spectrum of sunlight is continuous so there is a virtual infinity of colors.

Quantum mechanics (QM) is the science of the very small. It mathematically describes the behavior of matter on the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. There are several interpretations of QM which seek to explain how QM informs our understanding of nature. My favorite interpretation of QM is Hugh Everett’s “Many Worlds Interpretation” (MWI). MWI happens to be the favorite of most physicists, including Stephen Hawking and Nobel Laureates Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynmann, and Steven Weinberg. In fact, L. David Raub’s poll of 72 "leading cosmologists and other quantum field theorists" reveals that 58% said they accept MWI as being correct. What does MWI say about the world?

According to MWI, when an event happens that could have two or more outcomes, the universe splits into two or more universes so that all possible outcomes happen. Each universe gets one of the possible outcomes. The resulting universes don’t interact again, so we can’t detect them and we can’t prove the split occurred. However, QM has some disturbing issues that are resolved easily if we assume the split happens.

Perhaps it might be easier to accept the idea of multiple universes if we stop calling them universes and, instead, refer to them as realities. An event is to a time-stream as a prism is to light. An event diffracts our reality into multiple realities. Each reality then experiences another event, and the split occurs again.

This seems like a prodigious “waste”, but a waste of what? Is it a waste of light to create all the colors of the rainbow by sending that light through a prism? These other realities exist, though we can’t touch them or see them or interact with them. At least, that is what MWI’s interpretation of the math implies. Perhaps they exist only in potential – ghost realities awaiting a visit by a conscious mind to bring them into being.

There is much we don’t know about our own reality: how it originated, where the laws of physics and mathematics came from, where physical constants such as the speed of light came from. The more we learn about our reality, the bigger the questions become.

If we could visit them, many of these alternate realities would appear almost identical to our own. Some of them will be significantly different. Drop a loaded pistol onto the floor; in one reality it fired and shot you dead, but in this reality it hit the floor and bounced harmlessly, so here you are: alive and well and being more careful. That’s a significant difference … at least to you.

In some realities, you died at birth, or you were never conceived. In others, you’re rich and famous now. Everything that could have happened, did happen, somewhere. That is the consensus among quantum physicists, most of whom don’t want to discuss it because it is too bizarre.

Some say that if MWI is correct, it is irrelevant because there is no way to visit or interact with these other realities. I disagee. There is no conventional way to visit them. You can’t visit another reality by flying there in a spaceship or contact the inhabitants on a shortwave radio. But I think there is a way to visit those other realities and even to live in them. And the key to that is consciousness.

We don’t understand consciousness. We experience it, but we don’t know how or why we experience it. We may one day build a supercomputer that mimics consciousness, but that is not the same thing as being conscious. And there is something very special about consciousness as it relates to QM and our reality.

Another interpretation of QM, called the Copenhagen Interpretation, says that certain elements of our reality, such as the spin of a quantum particle, do not exist until we measure them. Our measurement of the property creates the property we are measuring. This is alluded to in the famous thought experiment called Schrödinger’s Cat, in which a cat in a box is both alive and dead until we open the box and observe the cat. The Copenhagen Interpretation says that our act of observing the cat causes the alive-and-dead cat to become one or the other: alive or dead. According to MWI, our act of observing the cat splits our reality into two realities; the cat is alive in one and dead in the other. Either way, consciousness seems to create reality at a fundamental level.

Assume for a moment that MWI is correct and that our thoughts can move our consciousness this way or that way among an infinity of possible realities. The realities “closest” to ours are so similar to our own that you would be hard-pressed to find any differences. Maybe you came home one day and tossed your keys onto a table next to the front door. And maybe when you wanted to leave home, you couldn’t find your keys. You had to hunt for them and finally found them on the dining room table. But you were so sure, so positive, that you had put them on the table next to the door, so how did they end up on the dining room table? You shrug and go on your way, a minor mystery soon forgotten.

But what really happened? Could it be that your consciousness slipped from one reality into a slightly different reality? The new one is very much like the old one, there being only minor differences, such as your keys being in a different place. And maybe these slips happen all the time and 99% of the time we’re not aware of it.

Random thoughts tug us this way and that way. But suppose you spend a significant amount of time every day in thoughts about a certain thing, be it money, love, cars, movies, sex, or whatever. Just maybe, over some period of time, you might find that your world has changed and now you’re in a different reality from where you used to be; you’re now in a place that you perhaps never expected to be. Be careful what you think, because the totality of your thoughts is the engine that will drive you to a different reality.

“You are given the gifts of the gods, you create your reality according to your beliefs. Yours is the creative energy that makes your world. There are no limitations to the self except those you believe in.”  -- Seth (As channeled by Jane Roberts) in “The Nature Of Personal Reality, Chap. 22, Session 677”