Question: Do you believe in the multiverse theory?

Douglas Blane answered on 23 Jun 2010:

OK, there are a few multiverse theories, all of them pretty weird.

But one thing physics teaches you is the world is weirder than it looks.

So there’s a multiverse theory that our universe is just one of an infinity of universes out there somewhere beyond our reach.

There’s also a theory called the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which was first dreamt up by a guy called Hugh Everett. (His son’s a rock star called Mark Everett or just “E”) http://paralleluniverse.msn.com/features/music/eels-interview/

According to the many worlds idea every time the world has a choice it doesn’t choose it splits. Into two separate universes.

So every time you decide to have a snickers instead of a mars bar the universe splits in two.

Sounds loopy I know but there are good scientists who say it must be true. The best of them is David Deutsch and he’s convinced that many worlds is true. http://www.qubit.org/people/david/structure/Documents/Non-Technical/Frontiers.html

He works on quantum computers, which nobody has built yet. But if they can build one it’ll be more powerful than all the PCs in the world.

In fact Deutsch says that a quantum computer only works because of many worlds. As it’s doing its sums it gets all the copies of itself in the parallel universes to do the sums at the same time.

Do I believe any of this?

Well I want to. I really like mind-blowing stuff like time-travel and parallel universes. So I think it’s great that modern science is starting to tell us these things might be possible.

And not just in a parallel universe.