The existence of a parallel universe could fare well in science fiction movies but it appears that the concept is no longer just limited to movie plots. A team of scientists has looked at the possibility of many worlds existing side by side and interacting with each other.
In a bold new theory described in a study published in the journal Physical Review X on Oct. 23, Michael Hall, from the Centre for Quantum Dynamics at the Griffith University in Australia, and colleagues proposed a new quantum theory based on the concept of interaction between parallel universes.
In the 2001 American movie "The One," the antagonist character played by Jet Li sought out to kill all variations of himself in alternate universes in a bid to become very powerful. Imagine if an alternate version of yourself does exist in a parallel universe.
The researchers proposed that such universes really exist and they interact with each instead of evolving independently. They also claimed that these universes influence each other by a subtle repulsive force, which could explain some of the irregularities in quantum mechanics that have puzzled scientists for a long time.
Wiseman and colleagues posit that the universe that we know of is just one of many worlds, some of which are nearly identical to ours and most very different from our world, which makes it possible that in some universes, the asteroid that annihilated the dinosaurs may have missed Earth or you could have been born in a different country.
The researchers also proposed that these worlds existed side by side from the beginning of time and that the universal force of repulsion between nearby worlds gives rise to all quantum phenomena that tend to make these worlds more dissimilar.
"All quantum phenomena arise from a universal force of repulsion that prevents worlds from having identical physical configurations," the researchers wrote. "Each world is simply the position of particles in three-dimensional space, and each would evolve according to Newton's laws if there were no interworld interactions."
Hall even said that the theory dubbed the "Many-Interacting Worlds" may even make it possible to test the existence of other universes.
"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," Hall said. "In between it predicts something new that is neither Newton's theory nor quantum theory."
