Infinite Possibilities: Many Worlds and the Chickpeas of Sadness
“There’s this thing in quantum physics,” I say as she eases the car back into the same spot where she was parked before. “It says that there are zillions of copies of the universe, countless variations. It means there are other worlds in which Elise never got into a car accident. And others in which she never existed at all.”
“Huh,” Anna says.
I don’t know what made me go into all that; it’s something I keep tucked away usually, just for me. She puts the car in park but doesn’t turn off the engine. There are goose bumps on her forearm, where the sleeve of her dress ends, and I wonder if it might be because of what I told her about Many Worlds. Either that or the air-conditioning, which is still turned up much too high. Then she says, “Do you believe that? Do you think that’s how it works?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her honestly. “I guess it doesn’t matter much, because either way, we’re stuck here. It’s not like we can pick the best universe to live in.”
This is a passage from my book Right Here, Right Now, in which one of the main characters, a 17-year-old named Liam, is trying to explain a principle of quantum physics to a girl he maybe wants to make out with. When I first drafted this passage, I was feeling stuck, too, but then, so was most of the rest of the global population. I’d already spent the better part of a year obsessively checking my phone for news of the pandemic (“No vaccine yet, but here are 84 recipes you can make with canned chickpeas!”) and performing badly as an impromptu preschool teacher (“I think this finger paint is going to take a while to dry. Let’s just watch Moana.”), and I couldn’t stop imagining what the world would be like if just one tiny thing (microscopic, actually) was different—if the coronavirus had never gone berserk and taken over the world.
In that virus-free other world, I wouldn’t be imprisoned in my own apartment; I would be finishing my maternity leave, writing daily, traveling, meeting people, thriving. It was a game in which there was no winning; the world I was in simply couldn’t measure up to the one I was imagining.
If I’m being completely honest, though, the pandemic was not the first time I had found my mind running along this track. When the going gets tough in some way, my inclination is always to think, “How did I end up here? What exact set of stupid decisions on my part led me here, to this moment, to this crap set of circumstances?” Then I’ll spend some precious moments fantasizing about the other possible versions of Shannon: the one who became a high-powered doctor and never has to worry about money, the one who miraculously maintained her 21-year-old body, the one who isn’t so lazy and has just solved this whole climate change thing already.
It’s not a quality that I particularly like about myself, this tendency to glance over my shoulder at the roads not taken. But then, maybe we can’t help some of this as we age. At the outset of adulthood, when we’re teenaged and fresh, the idea of infinite possibilities is a gift, a Choose Your Own Adventure book just waiting for us to riffle its pages.
But as we soldier onward through the years and those infinite possibilities become winnowed down to one, the concept seems a lot more bittersweet. Or maybe just bitter. How dare those other Shannons show me up in this way? How dare they highlight all my weaknesses? Who even needs the Joneses when there are plenty of versions of yourself with whom to keep up and, failing that, be jealous of?
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*****
I don’t remember what, exactly, made me start reading Something Deeply Hidden, by Sean Carroll. Picking up a book about quantum physics, even a surprisingly approachable one, doesn’t really sound like me, but at the time, we were all doing things that we didn’t typically do (see: the sudden run on baker’s yeast at my local grocery store). Regardless of how I stumbled there, I was fascinated by Carroll’s exploration of the Many Worlds principle.
Here, for my non-physicist brethren, is a little more background on what Liam was trying to explain to Anna in that passage above. In 1954, a doctoral candidate named Hugh Everett drank too much sherry one night and came up with an idea to solve one of the great physics mysteries of our times, the measurement problem. What’s the measurement problem?
Basically, a quantum system is supposed to consist of wave functions, and those tiny particles that we spent so much time thinking about in the classical physics of a high school classroom actually behave like waves rather than particles. The instant we try to observe this and measure it, though, the wave function collapses and the particle looks like…well, like a particle again, like it is in a single position.
I know, I know: You are probably thinking that this really does not sound like all that big of a deal (and also does not have all that much to do with sad pandemic Shannon opening another can of chickpeas). But you’re just going to have to go out on a limb here and believe me that the measurement problem was a Very Big Deal—let’s just go ahead and say an Extremely Big Deal—so big that people like Nils Bohr and Albert Einstein racked their enormous brains and came up with, frankly, some pretty lame and unsatisfactory ways of dealing with it. They came very close to whatever the physicists’ version of fisticuffs is over the whole thing.
Anyway, back to Everett and his eureka moment. He was like, “Guys, it’s not just the observed particle that is part of the quantum system—the person observing the particle is part of that system, too.” (He probably didn’t say “guys,” or if he did, it was just the sherry talking.) What Everett meant was that the particle really is in multiple positions, but SO IS THE OBSERVER. So one version of a physicist is measuring the particle in one spot while another version of that same physicist is in another world measuring it in another spot. It sounds a little complicated, but the math that supports this idea is much simpler, actually, than the extremely complex workarounds that other physicists had put forth before this. The implications of this idea, however, are anything but simple: It means that an infinite (or near-infinite) number of possibilities are being played out across multiple worlds.
There was a part of myself that finally felt satisfied when I managed to kind of, sort of wrap my head around this explanation. I wasn’t crazy to be imagining a great cosmic do-over, and here was the proof; it was entirely possible—nay, likely—that there were different Shannons living very different lives in different worlds, and there were a lot of smart-sounding physicists to back me up on this point. Look—it’s science, okay? I am absolutely, positively super-duper famous and brilliant and powerful and probably have skinnier thighs, too, in some other world out there.
But then (sigh), does it even matter?
Carroll spends some time in his book pondering the moral and ethical implications of Many Worlds. What’s to keep us from leaving civility behind—harming someone, say, or ourselves—if every possibility is being played out in some world anyway? It throws into disarray our beliefs that choices even matter. (During this chapter of the book, I imagined a bunch of quantum physicists stumbling around in the snow like George Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life, ready to fling themselves off the nearest bridge.) Ultimately, though, Carroll dismisses this doom and gloom because of things like wave function probabilities and utilitarianism and some other scientific stuff that I have a hard time thinking about for longer than ten consecutive seconds.
But I arrived at a similar conclusion, albeit via a writer’s kind of shortcut route that involved a lot less math. That’s when I wrote that early scene in the book, Liam’s take on Many Worlds, which was, essentially: A zillion worlds out there, but you still have to play the hand you were dealt, dance with the one who brought you, stare down those lemons and look up 84 recipes you can use them in.
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*****
It was the message I needed at that particular moment, I guess. Most of us were stuck playing with a less than ideal hand that year, but if you’re sitting somewhere reading these words right now, you survived long enough to be dealt into another round. We inched back to a scene that felt familiar—travelers filling airplanes, kids filling classrooms, and strangers with BO standing too close to me on the subway. The concept of Many Worlds inched forward in my mind, too, as I worked on the book.
Writers sometimes get asked of their characters, “So which one is you?” The answer, at least for me, is all of them, even the villains. Liam is a teen, in many ways still filled with the starry-eyed possibilities of life and love and rock ‘n’ roll, but he has experienced grief, too, turns of events that allow him to see that the worst could be right around the corner in this world, the one in which we’re stuck. I have that tendency in me, too.
But there’s another main character in the book, Anna, who hasn’t yet learned to anticipate the worst. When her best friend Elise is grieving a loss, they have this conversation:
“I guess I don’t have to tell you that you couldn’t have stopped this from happening. It’s not like Eric was particularly interested in anyone telling him what to do.”
Elise shakes her head. “You don’t know that. Nobody knows that.”
“Well, let me be the one who feels guilty about it,” I say. “I’m glad you weren’t hanging out with Eric when this happened. I am relieved, because I can’t stand the thought that you might have been in that car crash. I’d never survive that. I’d never be able go on living my life if that happened.”
“That’s not true,” Elise says. “There’s a reason for the phrase ‘life goes on.’ ”
“No,” I say stubbornly, because it is true. “The world would stop without you in it.”
And that’s me, too. The things that I’m really attached to in this world, my world—my family, my dearest friends, my happiest memories—don’t feel like they could be stripped away in some other world in the way that I fantasized about all those lesser annoyances of life disappearing. The positives of this world feel like inevitabilities.
Science tells us this isn’t true, of course. The particle is as likely to spin this way as that one; the good things about our lives are among those infinite possibilities that vary across worlds. Do I really want to live in a world in which I’d never been forced to contemplate the ethics of toilet paper hording if it meant giving up the weird nonsensical joke about two-legged cows that my four-year-old told me yesterday? I’m pretty sure that Many Worlds doesn’t work like this, running on an engine of tit for tat, addition and subtraction…but I don’t want to take the chance.
That was the truth that ultimately made me feel softer toward all those other, better versions of myself, living out their lives in alternate worlds. It’s impossible to know what those more perfect Shannons are having to go without. The quantum physicist Max Tegmark said, “I feel a strong kinship with parallel Maxes, even though I never get to meet them. They share my values, my feelings, my memories—they’re closer to me than brothers.”
That’s how I know that, wherever they are, the parallel Shannons are trying to put one foot in front of another, popping open another can of chickpeas if that’s the best thing they can find, and maybe sometimes, in a moment of weakness, fantasizing about the paths not taken. I wish them well.