Imagine a world where the Russians settled the Americas or the Germans won World War II. No, this isn't the plot of the Wolfenstein video games, but a concept that suggests that there are parallel worlds similar to our own, but also different, either in big or small ways.
The concept of parallel worlds has long been a staple of science fiction entertainment, but a group of Australian physicists suggest that they actually do exist and that they interact with each other.
Most importantly, because of the way parallel worlds interact with each other, this new proposal could explain some of the great mysteries of quantum mechanics, which deal with how the Universe works, covering things we don't yet know, including how those laws govern all matter. At times, quantum mechanics makes no sense at all and doesn't even correlate to the standard scientific laws of cause and effect.
Scientists are the first to tell us that the concepts of quantum mechanics are difficult to understand and even harder to explain. But this group of physicists think that it becomes much easier when you consider that parallel worlds are real.
"In the well-known "Many-Worlds Interpretation," each universe branches into a bunch of new universes every time a quantum measurement is made," says Professor Howard Wiseman from Griffith's Centre for Quantum Dynamics. "All possibilities are therefore realised— in some universes the dinosaur-killing asteroid missed Earth. In others, Australia was colonised by the Portuguese."
However, Wiseman points out that in this older theory, those worlds don't influence ours. However, the new theory of "Many Interacting Worlds" is different. For example, our Universe is just one of many worlds, some that are very similar to our own and others that are drastically different. Each world, though, is real and exists through time and space in the same way. However, a force called "repulsion" guarantees that worlds are more dissimilar than similar.
The team believes that this new theory is so well-defined that it could eventually be tested in the lab in a search for these parallel worlds and lends itself to such real-world experiments that might teach us more about quantum mechanics.
"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," says Dr. Michael Hall, also from Griffith's Centre for Quantum Dynamics. "In between it predicts something new that is neither Newton's theory nor quantum theory."
The general concept of parallel worlds is a fascinating one, especially when that suggests that there's a world out there where Jar Jar Binks was cut from the Star Wars films.
[Photo Credit: John Fowler, Wiki Commons]
