Parallel Universes

Just stopping by quickly to share this.  I thought people on here would find it interesting.  I doubt any of it will be news to the science geeks here, but anyway...

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I've long been a fan of Eels - maybe, more specifically, front man and main creative force Mark Everett.  Lyrics, like the one above and the one in the song link below, have always felt like they were written by someone like me, for someone like me.  The title for one of his songs, The Love of the Loveless, has provided an organising idea for some writing I'm currently working on.

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I didn't realise until doing some research on Mark Everett that his father was a famous quantum physicist who studied under Einstein at Princeton.  Hugh Everett III was the physicist who first proposed what became known as the Many-Worlds Interpretation.  In layman's terms, the hypothesis states that there is a very large, perhaps infinite number of universes, and everything that could possibly have happened in our past, but did not, has actually occurred in the past of some other universe or universes.  Applied to the famous Schrodinger's Cat theorem, the Many-World's Interpretation (MWI) hypothesises that every event is a branch point; the cat in the box is both alive and dead, even before the box is opened, but the "alive" and "dead" cats are in different branches of the universe, both of which are equally real, but which do not interact with each other.

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I think I can just about get my head around that.  Like Mark Everett, I'm a self-confessed scientific dunce.  He didn't inherit his father's mathematical and scientific genes.  As well, in a way, as it may have led him away from his music career.  Or maybe he'd have had that in a parallel universe.

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