From Science Fiction To Reality: Many Worlds, Not Just One World

If you’ve been watching the American TV series “The Flash”, then we’re pretty sure the multiverse concept is familiar to you. So far, they’ve introduced characters from different Earths — what they’re calling as Earth 1 (our own universe); Earth 2 (where Dr. Wells and his daughter Jessie come from); and Earth 3 (where the speedster is the father of Earth 1’s Barry Allen). It’s a bizarre world they live in. And now some scientists are saying that the existence of parallel universes might actually be true? Yes, it’s truly a bizarre world we’re living in.

The theory is referred to as the ‘Many-Interacting Worlds Theory’ and it has actually been around since 1957. It started as the ‘Many Worlds Theory’, speculating that there isn’t just one world, but many worlds which exist as distinct entities, in different locations, separate from each other. Supposedly, these different universes give birth to other universes whenever a quantum measurement or event takes place, consequently allowing all possible outcomes to be realized. The analogy given is that in some universes, the dinosaur-killing asteroid did not hit Earth, and in others, it was the Portuguese who colonised Australia and not the other way around.

The theory has now evolved into the ‘Many Interacting Worlds Theory’. Spinning off from the concept of quantum physics, this theory hypothesizes that multiple worlds exist, but not independently. Instead, different versions of the world simultaneously exist in a single timeline, occupying the same space, overlapping, influencing and interacting with each other on a quantum level. Which makes them testable and detectable. Supposedly.

According to Dr. Michael Hall, one of the authors of the ‘Many Interacting Worlds Theory’ (the other two being Professor Howard Wiseman and Dr. Dirk-Andre Deckert): “The beauty of our approach is that if there is just one world our theory reduces to Newtonian mechanics, while if there is a gigantic number of worlds it reproduces quantum mechanics.”

In the paper they published in the Physical Review X journal, they are proposing that our world is only one among many – some similar with ours, and others completely unlike. Also, a ‘universal force of repulsion between nearby worlds’ exists and it is this force that causes the worlds to become different from each other. And as changes in each universe continually happen, each world also becomes more different from each other.

Believing that there could be alternate worlds out there isn’t too hard, especially now that even Newton’s Laws of Motion and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity are about to be contested. The big challenge, of course, is the testing and detecting part. If Wiseman and his team can figure out a way to prove that interactions between different worlds do occur, the next thing we can be looking at may be a study on how to travel from one universe to another. Now that’s something worth waiting for.

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