How Many Lives Are You Leading Today?

500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider

We are living the beta of our lives, the untested, slightly buggy, first draft version. Or not. We might be living the perfect version of our lives, getting everything right, even though we might not know this until some time in the future. There’s an expression, “If my grandmother had balls she’d be my grandfather,” usually rendered in Yiddish and followed by a scornful bark of a laugh. You can’t grasp what might have been. Or can you?

Dr. J. Richard Gott is a professor of astrophysics at Princeton who likes to ask questions about time such as, “What if you could time-travel into the past?”

Say you did that and killed your grandmother and therefore were never born. Dr. Gott believes you would cause the universe “to branch off into a parallel universe with a time traveler and a dead grandmother.” Of course, there would also be a universe where your grandmother lived and you were born.

To use Dr. Gott’s analogy, it’s like a railway switching yard with lots of trains running on parallel tracks. This concept is called the Multiverse.

It’s the kind of concept that makes me want to gently close the door and listen to Bach until the concept goes away. But it’s not going to go away.

Not only are filmmakers exploring it in movies like “Sliding Doors” and “Run Lola Run” but scientists are exploring life as a set of coexisting pathways. A multiverse instead of a universe. Could be there’s a world where World War II never happened. A world where Tom Cruise admits he’s gay. A world where Madonna is a good singer.

Quantum theory has come up with some strange stuff: Protons and electrons act like both waves and particles. They can be teleported from one place to another without passing through space. A single particle seems capable of appearing in many places simultaneously.

Physicist David Deutsch says that “everyone agrees” that quantum theory is “outlandish.” That might be why many physicists only want to discuss quantum theory in reference to photons and electrons. But Deutsch takes a bigger risk, insisting that quantum theory must apply to something larger than subatomic particles – he says to be valid it has to apply to people. When you do that it generates some unsettling outcomes.

All possible variations of us must exist. Every possible option we’ve ever encountered is being acted out in some universe by at least one of our other selves.

Just when I thought life couldn’t become messier, with its moodiness and alternate side of the street parking regulations, now I have to consider that there could be other versions of us leading their own messy lives. What to make of that?

“Life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forward,” said Kierkegaard. He may have been gloomy but he was right. We’re all time travelers into the future. But it’s good to know there’s a parallel life train running somewhere, an on-time train that could be getting everything right. Does anybody know how to transfer at the next station?