Britney Spears and Justice Ginsburg –– BFF's?

by Lael

You are married to your college boyfriend, and Britney Spears lunches regularly with her BFF Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Yeah right, you say, maybe in some alternate universe. Despite your sarcasm, a team of scientists at Oxford University might be quick to agree with you.

First advanced by physicist Hugh Everett in 1950, and a favorite conceit of science fiction writers ever since, the parallel universe theory is one most of us have toyed with on occasion. What if somewhere else, in some other universe, you hadn’t overslept for your SATs, had gotten into Harvard after all, etc., etc. Even a tiny change, one bus missed or one book dropped, and our lives would be completely different. But a recent breakthrough, heralded by U.C. Davis physicist Dr. Andy Albrecht in New Scientist magazine as “one of the most important developments in the history of science,” means the stuff of idle daydreams may well be reality.

With a recent mathematical discovery by Oxford scientists, science fiction has become scientific fact. The numbers don’t lie; parallel universes are for real. Once disregarded as far-fetched, Everett’s strange and fascinating theory now provides a mathematical explanation for a central mystery of quantum theory. Quantum mechanically speaking, nothing at the subatomic level actually exists until it is observed. Before that, particles occupy a shadowy realm in which they simultaneously seem to appear in separate locations or to spin “up” and “down” at the same time. The participation of an observer appears to fix a certain state of reality the same way that a throw of the dice can only be said to come up snake eyes, double sixes or lucky seven once it has landed and not before. Oxford University’s Dr. David Deutsch and a group of his colleagues have demonstrated mathematically that Everett’s theory of branching parallel universes can account for the probabilistic nature of quantum activity.

At least, that’s what Dr. Deutsch has recently accomplished in this universe. In a parallel universe, he may well be taking Britney and Justice Ginsberg’s soup orders. I’m guessing he likes it better here.

| 09/30/07 | Fringe