Many Worlds Hypothesis

Oh Those Toothbrushes!

“You may think that in life, a lot of things happen to you along the way. The truth is, in life, you happen to a lot of things along the way.”

 - Dr. Shad Helmstetter

          What would’ve happened if I hadn’t forgotten my lunch today? How would my day be different if I had told my best guy friend that I’ve been crushing on him since I met him?? Each of our days are filled with choices, even if some of them seem inconsequential. Think of all those movies where one of the characters stoop to pick up a penny and they put their head down just in time to save their life from the evil guys’ bullet. Now if that hadn’t happened then that would have been the end of him. But the latter experience comes in a separate spilt off universe. That is what the Many Worlds Hypothesis is explaining.

                Each decision making it’s own path since the beginning of time. Each choice creating a new “island universe”. One says island universe because out of the many number of options since the Big Bang, or whatever one considers to be the beginning of the universe, the one universe that lead up to you, the reader, viewing this particular piece of writing is just one of an infinite number (and I really mean infinite!) of universes created explained in the Many Worlds Hypothesis. It is also known as the Many-Worlds Interpretation.

                To some saying, “Oh this is due to chance; it’s just the cosmic lottery,” just doesn’t cut it for their curiosity and previous conception of the world. That’s how it was with Hugh Everett in 1957, although known as the relative state formulation. Later Bryce Seligman DeWitt made famous and renamed Many-Worlds in the 1960s and ’70s. This theory puts into question a previously conceived idea that our world and universe has been just a single unfolding line of events. Another who has accepted and expanded this idea is Alexander Vilenkin.

          Vilenkin has brought up and published this concept in depth with his book Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes. In which he comments that he is aware that this is too much for a lot of physicists to take in. He also admits to some imperfections within this hypothesis with the commonly brought up understanding of the word ‘nothing’ and the poor logic consisting in that.

          Fine-Tuning: anyone ever hear of it? On philosophyofreligion.info they say, “The argument from fine-tuning suggests that the fitness of the universe for life either involves a series of staggering coincidences, or is the result of intelligent design.”

          Although I’ve heard some physicists and scientist differ on their opinions of whether this particular hypothesis contradicts with or supports the Many Worlds Theory, there is no doubt that these two can easily go side by side when talking about a point. It’s been used to try and confirm the existence of a God. Some may argue the point of how likely it is that everything fell perfectly in line for a piece of rock to be able to contain and support life, and intelligent life at that (which I can argue that point of how we know we should be considered intelligent; just because we compare ourselves to what we have around and that they seem a lot more dim than us. It just seems wrong).

                The point they’re making is that something must have guided this planet and our life forms because it is so highly improbable that we would have made it here and into this situation without the guidance and help from a more superior being. While a bundle of scientists have pointed out that if the Many Worlds Hypothesis was actually true then it would increase the chances of one of the many universes would be capable of bearing and keeping up life we still see multitudes of religions all over the place.

                And honestly it’s quite near impossible to write three pages on this subject because if you’ve looked at any of the websites that I have searched through, you can see that they couldn’t even write a three page essay on this subject. So I call this unfair.

                The Many Worlds Hypothesis is there to point out that through our lives a lot of decisions must be made and from those choices comes multiple consequences. It might have been that if I had told that boy about my long-term crush today that I would have been sitting in my room writing all about that conversation with him in my journal instead of writing this essay on the “should’ve, would’ve, could’ve”s in life. Through all of our choices there is an exact formula that lead each and every one of us to this precise moment in time, life, and the universe.

Sources

Ÿ  http://www.philosophyofreligion.info/theistic-proofs/the-teleological-argument/the-argument-from-fine-tuning/the-many-worlds-hypothesis/

Ÿ  http://www.philosophyofreligion.info/theistic-proofs/the-teleological-argument/the-argument-from-fine-tuning/

Ÿ  http://www.allaboutscience.org/many-worlds-hypothesis.htm

Ÿ  http://lifelessons4u.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/26-quotes-on-choices/

Ÿ  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many_worlds_hypothesis