I overheard some classmates talking about the many worlds hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation), yesterday. You know, the idea that there are an infinite number of parallel worlds, or alternate timelines, each one expressing one of the many possible outcome of every decision or choice made throughout history. Some timelines would be almost exactly like ours, except for one tiny change, and others would be vastly different, depending on how many changes there were. Often this is portrayed as a tangle of separate threads of existence, each one evolving on it’s own after branching off from another thread. One new theory even says that time travel might be possible, because time could move at different rates in alternate timelines, so that you could move into the past or future by crossing to another timeline where time was moving slower or faster.
while I was listening to that I had an idea. I was imagining that instead of discrete, individual timelines, that perhaps there was a continuous spectrum of possibility. When I was in college, I got ahold of a large, high-quality prism from an army surplus store. This was an optical quality component that would probably cost $100 or more if you got it from an optical supply house, but this place was selling them for a buck apiece as part of a surplus tank periscope. I’m not sure this guy knew what he had, or he wouldn’t have sold them so cheap.
Anyway, in the place were is was living at the time I had a window that faced south-west, and had direct sun most of the day. I also had an optical quality mirror about a foot square that came out of a copy machine or something. Playing around, I discovered that if I stood the prism on top of the mirror, put them both on my window sill and adjusted the prism just right, I could get a rainbow to go through my bedroom door and stretch a long way down the wall of a relatively dark hallway. I was fascinated by the rich colors, especially the dark purples on the edge of visibility. One thing that I noticed was, that no matter how much you stretched out the spectrum, there was never any division between the colors. There were always more and finer distinctions between the colors to be found.
What if reality was like that, that there were infinitely fine divisions between the alternate timelines?
Imagine that reality was like a bundle of an infinite number of threads, each thread an infinitely tiny range of possibilities. These threads are so fine, so close together, and so similar as to be virtually indistinguishable to us. What if, instead of the conventional model, where every decision creates a new branch, what is really going on is that all possible timelines already exist, and we slip between them by making decisions in our lives. Another way of looking at it would be to say that we experience a world by focusing on a particular point in the continuum of possibility. If that was the case, all we’d need to do to change our lives, is change our point of focus, like tuning to a different station on the radio to pick up a different station.
This could be a mechanism to explain how things like The Secret and The Power of Intention work. We don’t change reality with our intensions, instead we change which of the possible realities out there that we perceive. In a way, we take control of our destiny by consciously and deliberately selecting which of the available threads of possibility we will live into.
I don’t know if I’ve made myself clear here, but I’ve tried. If you have questions, please let me know and I will try and answer them. For my part, I think this a an exiting way to look at life and the universe.
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