Physicists are increasingly accepting the idea that there exists an infinity of realities stacked together like the pages of a never ending book, If this is the case then there are an infinite number of versions of you living out an infinite number of different lives in an infinite number of parallel realities.
In the chaotic inflation theory, a variant of the cosmic inflation theory, the multiverse as a whole is stretching and will continue doing so forever, but some regions of space stop stretching and form distinct bubbles, like gas pockets in a loaf of rising bread. Our universe can be likened to that.
Ok, I know, before you start booking a flight to a Swiss clinic to have yourself humanely put down,
chew on this possibility, which a lot of highly regarded physicists now argue for and it is this:
if the many worlds theory is correct it seems the only certainty is not death but immortality. We are all going to live forever. Go on, celebrate go out and treat yourself to a McDonalds and a milk shake.
So, let us continue to dare devil leap into this, spooky, mind boggling theory: in the mutiverse; this infinity, this eternity, all things that can or will happen have already happened. We are in the realms
of infinitarianism, where all events have occurred and will reoccur into infinity. So what was the point of me aiding that old woman across the road the other day, or indeed giving quite a handful of my hard earned dosh to a limbless ex service man in the Piccadilly underground. There are no brownie points for your do gooding charity because...you can not add a number to an infinity. Get me out of here.
But why do we human beings only ever experience one reality? I hear you ask.
Suppose a dice is thrown that contains six sides; we only experience one result, yet all six possible ways the dice can fall correspond to six different universes, are you beginning to get the idea.
You stand a pencil on a table, there is an infinity of ways the pencil can eventually fall in the interaction with the world and this interaction need only be infinitesimally small. Such as a single photon of light bouncing off the pencil which will turn out to be enough to shatter its isolation
causing the pencil to fall in one direction.
What the photon of light has done is to take information about this particular pencil to the rest of the world.
The pencil and the dice are in incoherent, superpositions. schizophrenic states, but decohere in what makes the blink of an eye seem like an eon. So if a pencil has started falling in all directions at once, the jostling of air molecules and photons of light has decohered it from its incoherent state into
falling in just one way. This is the reality that underlies our reality.
I am afraid I will have to stop there as I am getting a touch of ontological vertigo (reality sickness).
Live forever! Now where is that milk shake?
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