Splitting the universe into two and other cool tricks
Back in 2004, my friend had the idea of investing what we managed to salvage from our side hustle in “this new thing he read about” — Bitcoin.
I told him to f**k off and quit whatever he is smoking!! My bad :-(
A lot of water has gone under the bridge since and we were at the beach the other day. He asked me
“What if there is a parallel reality where we made the choice to put our dime on some crypto?”
I didn’t register my usual “You are high as a kite mate” response for his parallel reality rant. Because I knew this might just as well be the case.
The two of us sitting on the same beach talking, at least not worried about our debts if not rich. Yes!! in a parallel universe
Pour a little quantum physics and…. ta-daa!!!!
The Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics holds that there are many worlds which exist in parallel at the same space and time as our own
First coined by American physicist Hugh Everett III, many worlds theory proposes that measuring a quantum object does not force it into one comprehensible state or another.
Instead, The universe is duplicated, splitting into one universe for each possible outcome from the measurement.
For instance, You’re reading this article, but there’s another parallel timeline where you are not.
You married the love of your life but there is a universe in which you are still single
all at the same time, in each case, all you know and feel is the timeline that you’re in.
It may sound crazy and definitely is controversial, but cool to think about nonetheless.
And who knows, a few years from now and its quite possible that some dude comes up with a model that mathematically proves the many worlds Interpretation (Y’all remember what happened with gravitational waves?)
The Schrödinger’s Cat
Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger (the dude who gave us the Schrödinger Equation, that won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933) proposed his famous feline paradox in 1935.
This famous thought experiment involves a cat, a sealed container, a vial of poison that will be released based on the outcome of a random subatomic event such as radioactive decay.
If a monitoring device inside the box (a Geiger counter in this case) detects a random event that may or may not occur (decaying of an atom), the hammer falls and shatters the vial containing poison and kills the cat.
The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics suggest that
Inside the sealed container, until it is opened and observed, the cat is both alive and dead simultaneously. That is inside the box particle can exist in all of its theoretically possible states at the same time.
It is only when you open the box and measure the system, the reality collapse to either of the finite states. This state of being in all states at once is called quantum superposition
But the Copenhagen interpretation fail to answer the obvious question
When exactly the quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other?
Schrödinger’s intention was to illustrate the fundamental absurdity of quantum mechanics rather than explaining how a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time.
In the process of creating the thought experiment, he also coined the term “entanglement”. The many-worlds interpretation uses quantum entanglement to answer the question above.
“When the box is opened, the observer and the possibly-dead cat split into an observer looking at a box with a dead cat, and an observer looking at a box with a live cat. But since the dead and alive states are decoherent, there is no effective communication or interaction between them”
