Korridorium

♫ Sraf ♫

63/398

I enter the corridor. Large-format black-and-white photos of rhinoceroses hang on the walls between the doors—snapshots from my last trip to Africa. For a moment, I stand there, hesitant. What was I here for again? Well, actually, it’s irrelevant which of the doors in the corridor I choose or whether I go any further—at least for a follower of the Many-Worlds Theory like me, who assumes that every decision made creates as many parallel realities as there are possible alternative decisions.

Now I remember: I want to go to the smoking lounge—the right door. But that’s only here. An alter ego of mine in another, otherwise entirely identical world is now opening the left door and entering the billiard room. Another version of me simply walks all the way to the door to the garden, creating a new world that is otherwise identical to this one in every last detail. Just as a parallel reality splits off from mine when one of us, on a whim, turns around and goes back to the kitchen for another (or third or fourth…) shot of bitters.

You see where I’m going with this?

Whatever I do—ultimately, in the form of countless incarnations inhabiting just as many parallel worlds, I do everything. Even a banal act like entering a corridor already creates a multitude of worlds. And this is not philosophical nonsense but simply the consequence that physicists draw from sophisticated experiments.

Somewhere in the multiverse, color photos of rhinoceroses adorn this corridor. Or photos of giraffes. Or unicorns. Or maybe they are old silent film posters.

Somewhere, I am a burglar in this corridor. Or a visitor. The bill collector. Or the cleaning lady.

Somewhere, my children are romping through the halls. There was a civil war, and my house has burned down to its foundations. Everything is desolate because a plague has depopulated the country. My family and friends and I are joyfully celebrating because hunger has finally been eradicated from the planet.

It’s pretty crazy, the horizons that open up. Unfortunately, I only know this in theory—my feeling is that only one version of myself lives and breathes, namely this one, and even that I’m not always entirely sure of. And even about that, I’m not always sure. Currently, I’m feeling a bit irritable because of my stomach trouble. And it doesn’t help to know that somewhere else in the multiverse—unreachable but just as real as you and me—a parallel-world counterpart of mine is in love, feeling butterflies in their stomach, ready to embrace the world. To name just one of presumably countless other realities…

And if you now believe that, in the face of these imagination-defying prospects, it would be completely irrelevant how we make our decisions or even how we feel: you’d be mistaken! This is mine alone, my very own thing, and no matter how it’s fashioned elsewhere, no parallel version of me, no matter where they may be, is having this precise experience. Admittedly, I’ve been dealt a bad hand with this upset stomach. But that will pass. How about you?

What’s clear is that whatever I write (and whatever you are reading or having read to you right now), eventually, in the form of a parallel version of myself, I’m also somewhere writing the opposite. Or a version that fits in 140 characters. Or perhaps even a more gripping, emotional version that sends my readers’ hearts racing and prompts a renowned Hollywood producer to think that this should be made into a feature-length film.

So you can rest assured: somewhere in the multiverse of quantum physicists, there is a parallel world where this text or an alternative version or interpretation of it deeply touches something inside you, inspiring you to shape this—this—world in your own unique way and perhaps even make it a better one.

(You can believe me or not. It makes no difference to me or to you, because, indeed, ultimately both apply.)

Parallele Welten:

The Odds of Your Existence: