Choose Your Own Adventure books and the Many Worlds hypothesis

There's this classic physics experiment where they shoot a beam of photons or electrons or any similarly tiny particle at a barrier in front of a detector screen. If there are two parallel slits in the barrier, the stream of particles through them creates an interference pattern on the detector very much like a water wave. See a groovy interactive illustration here. The interference effect persists even when your 'beam' consists of single photons fired one at a time. This implies that individual photons 'know' what the others are doing, and they all conspire to cumulatively draw a tidy interference pattern the same way they would if they were part of a big gush all at once. If you'd rather think of the individual particles as little constituent parts of a wave, the question is, a wave of what? Physicists use the term 'probability wave' but no one really gets what it is that's doing the waving. If you're game for some profoundly unsettling thinking, Brian Greene can bring you up to speed on all the details.

There are several conflicting interpretations of such mysterious atomic-scale events. The one I find most convincing is Hugh Everett's 'many-worlds' hypothesis. Everett held that all the possibilities described by quantum theory simultaneously occur in a 'multiverse' composed of mostly independent parallel universes. While the multiverse is deterministic, we perceive non-deterministic behavior governed by probabilities, because we can observe only the particular outcome taking place in the universe we inhabit. However, according to the theory of quantum decoherence, the parallel universes will never be accessible for us.

The idea is that every time there's a submicroscopic happening with more than one possible outcome, the spacetime loaf branches off, with one for each outcome. In the Futurama episode with all the universes in boxes, the joke is that the two main universes differ based on the outcome of a single coin flip. For me the best way to imagine the many-worlds scenario is to think of spacetime as a humungous movie. Each 'frame' is a snapshot of every single particle in all of space at a particular instant of time. At each particle interaction, multiple versions of the movie diverge, and where the outcome of the interaction is still in doubt, as in the two-slit experiment, you're seeing overlapping movie frames. The interference pattern is an overlap between outcomes. For a particularly poetic treatment of this idea, see Six Feet Under, season three, episode one.

Remember Choose Your Own Adventure Books? For those not in my age cohort, here's the idea as described by Wikipedia.

After an introduction to the story, the reader was given choices of how the story should progress. For instance:

• If you decide to start back home, turn to page 4.
• If you decide to wait, turn to page 5.

Depending on the reader's choice, the plot would unfold in different ways and eventually lead to many different possible endings.

The types of multiple endings that the Choose Your Own Adventure books featured include:

• At least one -- but often a few -- endings depicting the most desired resolution (e.g., the villain's plans are foiled and he/she subsequently either arrested or killed) and the main character, friend, or other 'good guy' character is rewarded handsomely.
• Endings that result in death, either of the main character, one or more 'friends', or both, because of an incorrect choice the reader made. Usually, this plot twist involves the villain learning of the good guys' investigation, subsequent confrontation and deadly resolution.
• Other endings that may either be satisfactory (but not the most desired ending) or unsatisfactory (but not always totally bad).
• At least one of the books has an ending where the reader becomes the villain.

One book revolved around the search for a mythical paradise that no one can actively reach; one of the pages in the book describes the player finding the paradise and living happily ever after, but none of the choices in the book led to that page, meaning that not even the person reading the book could get there, unless by accident.

The books are like simple video games on paper. I used to like to 'cheat' by using bookmarks to explore each different outcome of a particular choice, not wanting to miss out on any juicy plot developments. (Family Guy can back me up on that one.)

So imagine that the entire universe is a giant Choose Your Own Adventure book. From wikipedia's entry on entropy as information content:

Independent fair coin flips have an entropy of 1 bit per flip. A source that always generates a long string of A's has an entropy of 0, since the next character will always be an 'A'.

Every bit flip - every choice at the bottom of the quantum page - generates entropy. The history of the universe is the history of every particle interaction's possible outcome, with different worldlines branching off for each one.

The conditions of the universe today are the result of frightfully specific and delicate conditions in the very early universe. From Timothy Ferris, I learned that in the earliest microseconds after the Big Bang, there were a billion and one quarks for every billion antiquarks. If this ratio had been very slightly different, the universe today would be unrecognizably different from the one we inhabit. The same thing is true for the relative cosmic abundance of the elements, the strength of the various forces, and so on. In the many-worlds hypothesis, there are universes out there somewhere where all these ratios and constants have every conceivable value, with some resembling our reality and most not resembling it in the slightest. These universes are floating in the eleven-dimensional bulk, perhaps different four-dimensional shadows of higher-dimensional events, as the string theorists would have it.

Charles Seife is a responsible scientist who gives a good information theoretical read on the world in his book Decoding The Universe. This is a good book, but it's full of needlessly alarming language. Right in the introduction:

The laws of information are beginning to reveal the answers to some of the most profound questions of science...

Okay, I'm interested, do go on.

...but the answers are, in some ways, more disturbing and more bizarre than the paradoxes they solve.

Uh-oh, that doesn't sound so hot.

Information [theory] leads to a picture of a universe speeding toward its own demise, of living creatures as slaves to parasites within, and of an incredibly byzantine cosmos made up of an enormous collection of parallel universes. The laws of information are giving physicists a way to understand the darkest mysteries that humanity has ever pondered. Yet these laws are painting a picture that is as grim as it is surreal.

This passage deserves a closer read. The universe will be "speeding" toward its demise in a hundred or so billion years. The "parasites" to which living creatures are "enslaved" are our genes. The mysteries are "dark." The "laws" are "painting" a "grim" and "surreal" picture. Why all the anxious language? Is the insight that our universe is a lit fuse burning through spacetime, perhaps one of inconceivably many, so terrifying? I think it's actually a really groovy image, beautiful in that 'gazing stoned into the fractal poster' way. The genes and memes might be parasites, but they're symbiotic parasistes that benefit as well as exploit us, the way that some of the billions of bacteria mooching around your gut help digest your food. Why be so frightened of your genes and memes if they're such fundamental constituents of you? Unless you don't like yourself, of course, in which case I suppose it's natural to not like your smallest parts either.

I feel Seife's pain in some ways. The multiverse idea could be interpreted to make us seem pretty tiny and insignificant. Seife observes wisely that from Newton through Darwin, scientific discoveries tended to make humans seem more powerful. But the general trend in the history of cosmology has been to steadily expand the known universe, thus shrinking the human part of it by comparison. First we found out about other tribes, then other continents, other planets, other solar systems, other galaxies, other gargantuan clusters of galaxies of galaxies separated by appallingly enormous voids. More universes would be even more overwhelming. To reply that we're also stupendously immense compared to bacteria and molecules and atoms and quarks isn't much comfort. Darwin makes it worse still by suggesting that the entire vast edifice of life is a colossal series of improbable accidents.

But so Seife describes us as "slaves to the information inside us." What a metaphor! And completely wrong. It's like describing a house as being a "slave" to the bricks that comprise it. Seife finds the philosophical implications of modern thermodynamics and information theory to be overwhelming. Like most Westerners, he doesn't like being overwhelmed. Many of us experience egoless headrushes as a virtiginous, terrifying loss of control. What our friends in the East have been saying, though, is that actually, having your consciousness overwhelmed by the universe is a good thing, it's a desirable state, ultimately the most pleasurable and healthy one. Why should you be so anxious to preserve your commonsense notion of yourself as part of a simple and stable world when you aren't even really a contiguous 'thing' at all? Antonio Damasio reminds us:

Some of the cells in our bodies survive for as little as one week, most for not more than one year...[Our sense of self] is a vulnerable pattern of integrated operations...The entire biological edifice, from cells, tissues and organs to [brain] systems and images, is held alive by the constant execution of construction plans, always on the brink of partial or complete collapse should the process of rebuilding and renewal break down.

There are some anxious Christians out there who are reading up on modern physics and trying hard to fit the God of antiquity in there somewhere. From philosophyofreligion.info:

The argument from fine-tuning holds that it is remarkable that we have a universe fit for life. Given all of the possible ways that the universe might have been, it was vastly improbable that it would turn out to be habitable. Miraculously, though, it did; this, according to the argument from fine-tuning, points towards an intelligent designer creating with life in mind.

Humans like to imagine the world designed by some intelligence that is intelligible to us, ie the 'guy in the sky'. All of our abstract reasoning begins in the form of images of our own body states, so it's difficult to fully de-anthropomorphize any abstract concept. Cosmology in particular is a young science - remember, we didn't know about other galaxies in any kind of detail until a hundred years ago, much less the Big Bang or the cosmic background radiation or black holes or neutrinos or dark matter. People have been telling cosmological stories involving human-like gods for our entire known history, and it's going to be hard to let them go. I think we can do better than the guy in the sky. I'd rather see us all in the pages of the giant cosmic Choose Your Own Adventure Book.

© ethan hein 2007 | back to memebase | back to top