The Curtain’s Always Rising On Yet Another Parallel Universe

I was a fan of the old sci-fi TV drama Sliders – or at least a fan of what it could have been and occasionally was. Sabrina Lloyd, if you’re reading this, I’ll take your Mary Ann over Kari Wuhrer’s Ginger any day! That show of course is a takeoff on a theory developed in 1957 by Hugh Everett III called the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. To paraphrase Douglas Jones, according to the many worlds theory, whenever numerous viable possibilities exist the world (read universe) splits into many worlds, one for each different possibility. In each of these worlds, everything is identical, except for that one different choice; from that point on, they develop independently, and no communication is possible between them. Thus everything that can happen, does, somewhere. And if you think that’s weird, what’s even weirder is the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics that many-worlds replaced, and the fact that nobody has come up with a better idea to replace the Copenhagen interpretation since, though Michael Frayn did manage to do a scientifically interesting and overall pretty good Broadway play on it.

Which brings us to today, with almost a half-century to consider Everett’s seductive idea that somewhere we each have hit the Powerball lottery – just not here. The many-worlds theory is going strong and more accepted than ever. Case in point, a feature story for the May 2003 issue of Scientific American. Good article; check it out. As that great quantum mechanic William Shakespeare so wisely noted, all the (many) world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…