I’m not a big fan of them, though Spock looks great in a goatee. They never made much sense to me scientifcally and they seem like a crutch dramatically. Why is the parallel universe in various shows, including those unmentionable in the Corner, always so similar to the “normal” one? Why not transport into a universe where toasters eat clocks and we wear pants on our heads? Basically, in science fiction, parallel universes are a cheap ploy for the actors to play dress up and do something different with their characters. They’re still preferable to the holodeck. But what isn’t?
Anyway, that’s not the point. The other night I heard an NPR special while walking with my canine friend about physics and the problems of free will and the rest. I liked it. It was interesting. I don’t remember the name of the program. One of the tangents they got off to was the subject of parallel universes.
The subject came up to reassure a believer in free will that we still have some control and that not everything is determined. The gist should be familiar to those who’ve even bothered to continue reading this post on parallel universes. Every decision creates a parallel reality where we do the opposite decision. If I choose vanilla, there is another universe where I choose chocolate. Etc etc. According to the physicist guy, this theory was introduced by scientists totally unconcerned with the problem of free will and totally interested in explaining how reality (or should we say “Greater Reality) works in general. Physics is still a mess theoretically.
This makes no sense to me. Because we always hear it framed in these jokey hypotheticals about the guy who chooses vanilla over chocolate. But the real implication is that every second of every day hundreds of billions of universes are being created. Every human makes a zillion decisions a day, and most of them aren’t binary (chocolate v vanilla) but multivariate. Indeed, even the chocolate v. vanilla hypothetical isn’t really either/or. First there’s the choice of not ordering ice cream at all. There’s the option of only eating half of the chocolate ice cream or just half of the vanilla (or 2/3rds, 3/4ths etc.. into infinity). There’s the option of throwing the icre cream at the waiter, at the window or the floor. In all of these scenarios and many more, a parallel universe is supposed to spring into existence? The just doesn’t work for me. That seems to defy all the rules of energy conservation, E=MC2 and all the rest. Meanwhile, Yao Ming in a village in China has just created 17 universes by deciding to eat from three different bowls of noodles in a certain order. A my daughter has creat 702 universes by taking her toys out of the toy chest in this order as opposed to that. That’s an awful lot of universes to create based on the decisions of a single human mind.
But there is one redeeming side to this theory. It seems to create a special space for humans in that we are the only creatures with free will. Or at least we’re the only creatures who care about free will.