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Why Parallel Universes May, In Fact, Exist
Because everyone listens to me, and I have so much power, I’ve been working on The Rules of Time Travel. Time travel may indeed be a “thing”. Albert Einstein made us all realize that was possible when he described time as a destination, inseparable from space, spacetime. So the question then becomes, what is possible if time travel is possible? If spacetime is indivisible, then it becomes obvious that there are certain “rules” that would apply to time travel.
Rule #1: You can’t rewrite history. Every point in spacetime exists only once, so if you manage to time travel to a particular point in spacetime, your journey there is irrevocably a data point there, you can’t change it, your journey there has always been a part of that point in space time, and always will be.
So that was as far as I got, there must be other rules. Can you meet yourself and have a conversation with yourself? If you do, will the universe implode? What if you met yourself and killed yourself, would the future you instantly vanish? And suddenly everything becomes more complex.
There is a tantalizing clue in quantum physics, the probability wave. The movements of subatomic particles governed by quantum physics are random, and all the probabilities for a quantum particle exist, until an observation is made which collapses the probability wave. That all by itself seems to open the door to the possibility that an infinite number of copies of every universe exist.
So back to the time travel thing. Maybe my “Rule #1” is nonsense? What if you can go back in time and change history? The implication of that is also that parallel universes do exist and the universe is constantly, and infinitely dividing. What happened in the universe still exists, but when you rewrite history you create a parallel universe that includes the changes you made.
Something to think about as you slurp your morning coffee, or tea, or beer, as the case may be…