Quantum mechanics is littered with different interpretations, but at the core of the entire school of thought is the question of whether there are multiple universes of not. At the core of this idea is the thought, explicated by quantum mechanics, that everything we observe is simply the collapse of all probable scenarios into one specific outcome. Reality, viewed from that perspective, has a very cluttered cutting room floor. But are the things removed from the reel scraps or alternative narratives? There’s the big question.
To answer that question, we need to dive a bit into the mechanisms of the thing. Quantum mechanics says that all particles in the universe can be represented by what are called “wave functions.” A single wave function basically illustrates all the information about a specific system (i.e. a particle), detailing everything from position to velocity. The wave function itself also outlines all the probable outcomes of that system as well.
In other words, the wave function says what a particle is, and — more importantly — what it might being doing any any given time. It represents all possible futures of that particle.
But, as any human being knows, there’s only one future a particle actually has — the future that occurs. This is also the future that we are able to measure and observe. So measuring a particle basically collapses the wave function into one single reality. This is known as wave function collapse — or quantum collapse. At least, that’s the way it goes according to one interpretation, namely the Copenhagen interpretation first pitched by famed physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Zoom out on the math and the science and you get the philosophy: We are our ability to measure and observe what happens in this world.
But there’s another interpretation that doesn’t buy into this. It’s the Many World interpretation. In the 1950s, Hugh Everett proposed that wave functions actually don’t collapse. Instead, all the probable outcomes for every particle actually exist superimposed on one-another, meaning they all exist and all occur at the same time. If you don’t already understand what I’m getting at, allow me to spell it out for you: Everett’s theory basically says that the multiple possible futures for a single particle actually exist all at once. When you extrapolate that to include every particle ever in the universe, then that essentially says there is an infinite number of universes that exist in parallel.
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