Strollin’ Through the Multiverse

Most nights, if the weather allows, I will drive a few blocks from the apartment toward the river, where there exists a convenient walking track. It is illuminated at night and sparsely populated during winter months, so there I am able to not only get in a few extra steps for the day but also to think.

Tonight, I happened to glance up to look at the stars. I’ve always been fascinated with the greater Universe beyond our atmosphere, and I love wondering what is “out there.” (Which explains my enthusiasm for space telescopes!)

During this particular gaze, I just so happened to be passing under a lamppost, and in that moment something truly remarkable struck me: I was looking at two completely different eras of cosmic history simultaneously. 

There was the contemporary glow of the post, newborn photons fresh and free and enthusiastic, traveling side-by-side with a caravan of ancient, exhausted-but-still-determined photons, ejected from their respective stars while dinosaurs still walked upon the face of the Earth…all striking my retinas at the same time.

All of that—at least from my point of view—happened in a single moment.

Which made me start to think a lot about perception and reality. When, precisely, is now? What, daresay, is reality? We already know there is more to the Universe than we can perceive with our meager assemblage of human senses. Our very conception of time kind of falls apart when gazing at the light of distant objects.

And let’s not even start on such trivialities as quantum superposition. Schrödinger’s cat is both dead and alive? Countless potential realities all exist at once until directly observed, thus collapsing probability waves into one, cohesive quantum reality?

Sir, this is a Wendy’s. Outside speculative particle physics is not allowed.

Whoops. My bad.

Blame those pesky misbehaving photons, fooling around acting like particles and waves and generally messing with our entire understanding of the universe. All we wanted to do was see, guys. Did we really have to drag cats into this?

An illustration of the double-slit experiment, which explains that, indeed, photons be wack.

My love of square burgers and felines aside, I find this stuff endlessly fascinating. In another life, perhaps, I was a “Science Guy.” Maybe I still am, just a couple of entangled particles away? 

Huh. Distant times. Infinite Tophers. I may be biased, but I’m definitely the coolest one.

At least until I'm directly observed.