This idea puts a morbid twist on quantum theory, suggesting that a copy of you may remain alive, no matter what.
In the deadly game Russian roulette, a player loads a gun with a single bullet, spins the cylinder to randomize the bullet’s position, and turns the potentially lethal weapon on their own self. But in a thought experiment known as quantum immortality, this fatal game has not one but two outcomes: The player both dies and survives. And no matter how many times the player repeats this process, they will always die and survive.
Quantum immortality, and a variation of it called quantum suicide, is a thought experiment that pushes the thinker to confront the nature of the universe and of the self. (Crucially, it is not meant to be actually carried out.) Physicist Max Tegmark, now a professor of physics at MIT, popularized the idea in 1997 as a way to think about quantum mechanics, the physics that explains how the tiniest particles, like atoms and electrons, behave in uncertain ways and even exist in multiple states at once.
Quantum immortality has grave consequences. It’s not a mere question of going left or right, but of living or dying. Or rather, living and dying.
“In principle, you could do this over and over and over again,” David Kipping, Ph.D., a professor of astronomy at Columbia University, says. “But only you would know about it, because in the vast majority of these trillions of other realities, you’d be dead, and everyone would just watch you die.”
Tegmark’s idea emerges from an approach called the many-worlds interpretation, beginning with a concept called the universal wave function. This function defines the quantum state of the universe, which says there are multiple, parallel worlds branching out from various moments. American physicist Hugh Everett first put forward the many-worlds interpretation in 1955 when he was a Ph.D. student at Princeton University. It states that separate worlds emerge from probabilistic events in our universe, so that every world’s potentiality comes true. For example, if there’s a fork in the road, in one world you go left while in another world you go right. Note that this interpretation is distinct from the multiverse hypothesis, which posits that multiple universes exist simultaneously with many variations.
However, the many-worlds interpretation conflicts with another approach to quantum mechanics known as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation from 1920. This explanation—with contributions from notable physicists Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and others—describes a particle existing in what’s called a superposition, or existing in all possible states at once. Only when that particle is observed does it choose a state. This phenomenon relates back to the universal wave function; when the particle chooses a state upon observation, the universal wave function collapses from a superposition to a single quantum state.
Read More – Some Version of You Always Beats Death, According to This Scientific Theory
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