Opinion | Forget the Multiverse. Embrace the Monoverse. - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...multiverse-danger.html
multiverse parallel universes psychology culture history crisis
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Capgras syndrome. First defined a century ago, Capgras typically describes a person’s belief that someone close to him or her — a spouse or a child — has been replaced with a duplicate impostor
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n this case, the patient believed that the whole world — everything she could observe of it — was a duplicate, a fake.I know a little bit how that feels.So do you, probably.
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It’s easy to see the appeal of the multiverse, even as metaphor: the notion that we’re surrounded by a multitude of parallel selves, one of which might be living in a better timeline than the one we’re stuck in. It’s probably no coincidence that the idea has become so popular during an era of pandemic, climate change and political turmoil, when so many of us have felt helpless and trapped.
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Like the Capgras patient, we risk becoming detached from the world we can see and touch. Regardless of whether we can prove that the multiverse exists, the idea of it can distract us from doing the work we need to do to make this world better
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In 1957, a year after Lewis published his last Narnia book, a Princeton doctoral student, Hugh Everett III, published a dissertation bringing the ancient idea of the simultaneous existence of several worlds into the realm of modern science.
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Everett was trying to solve a seeming paradox in quantum theory: Certain elementary particles (say, a photon) seemed to exist mathematically in many places at once but could be detected at only one location at a time.
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Perhaps, Everett suggested, the act of detecting the particle splinters reality; perhaps the observer, and indeed the universe, splits into different possible timelines, one for each possible location of the particle. This would become known as the many-worlds interpretation
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In my 30s, I knew I had to save myself from the enticements of alternate realities. So I envisioned a new cosmology of time
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I felt a horrible sense of vertigo as I watched the life I’d been expecting to live tilting away from me. In this new timeline, my stepsiblings were no longer my siblings; they would become, instead, just people I knew for a while in high school.
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For years, I couldn’t stop thinking about other, better timelines where it didn’t happen, where my stepfather was still alive and my family intact. It helped me understand what was missing, but it did not allow me to mourn what I’d lost.
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And that’s the peril of the multiverse; I was becoming unreal to myself, nostalgic not for a time before the death happened but for a timeline in which it never happened at all.
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In “Everything Everywhere,” Joy, the character played by Stephanie Hsu, has become aware of every possible timeline. She succumbs to nihilistic despair. If everything is happening, then nothing can matter.
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We can joke or wonder whether we’re in the wrong timeline. But we can’t lose sight of the fact that this timeline is the only one we’ve got.
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When I was 12, my mother met a man, and suddenly the family I’d imagined for myself became real. I had an older brother who loved puns and an older sister who wrote poems.But when I was 19, my stepfather died of melanoma; within a few years of recriminations and disputes, our blended family unblended itself.
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Instead of a linear, branching timeline with multiple, parallel possibilities — so much more vivid than my real life — I tried to imagine time as a sphere always expanding away from me in every direction, like the light leaving a star.
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In this model of time, instead of the past receding behind me, it expands outward to surround me, always there and always present. The future is at the very center of the sphere, curled up infinitely small inside of me, waiting to be realized. That way, I can believe that there is nothing to come that I do not already contain
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if we have to believe in something invisible, let me believe in a version of the universe that keeps my focus where it belongs: on the things I can touch and change.