In all these shows and science fiction stories, the characters are always jumping through wormholes and einstein-podolsky-rosen bridges and popping up in other dimensions.

When you read this stuff, they always make it seem like they always start off in our dimension, our world, our timeline. They start off in our world and end up someplace else. When shows like Sliders started off, they made it look like it started here. Quinn's homeworld didnt have flying saucers, or hovercars, (or Gingers for that matter). It was depicted as it was our homeworld.

But with some thought, we realize this is NOT the case. These characters are not people in our world. Why, you say? It's simple:

In our universe, all the characters in these plots are characters in a fictional account, not real life people.

While it is not entirely impossible for visitors from another dimension to be named after characters in a show or book, or have followed the same adventures, it is extremely and highly improbable.

Billions of years ago, there was the big bang. Actually it began infinitesimally small, and didn't so much bang in the way that we think of it. It didn't actually make any sound, because sound requires not only an inciting incident but also a medium to travel through and a receiver like your ear, and none of those things existed yet when the big bang happened, so the big bang was neither big nor did it bang.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Now, a fraction of a nanosecond after the big bang began, the first subatomic particle had a chance of possibly occurring. This was due to cause and effect instances which occurred in the fractions of a nanosecond before this fraction of a nanosecond but I don't know how to describe those cuz I don't know what we call things smaller than subatomic particles. So just work with me here. When that happened, there were all of these variables and possibilities floating about and they were not noticeable by any passers by (if in fact there could have been any passers by which of course there couldn't have been because nothing, and I mean nothing had been invented yet) while simultaneously all being in this exciting and unignorable state of almost being! Like a bunch of bees inside a mason jar that a kid just shook up and is about to open, all these possibilities for subatomic particles were ready and raring to go. Would the first subatomic particle be one of those kinds of subatomic particles that would eventually make lead? Or iron? or hydrogen? The odds are that it was hydrogen, cuz there's so much of it now, but it could have just as easily been carbon, or silicon, or chlorine. We just don't know! It's all very exciting!

Now according to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle it's impossible to measure both the velocity and position of a subatomic particle at the same time, so when you are able to capture the velocity of a subatomic particle, the actual position of that particle at that given fraction of a nanosecond is totally unknown. You know how fast he's going, but he could be anywhere! Examination of the quandry behind Schroedinger's Cat leads us to the understanding that if you don't know the outcome of something, all those possibilities are actually happening simultaneously and it's not until the solidity of the outcome is revealed has one reality becomes concrete to your subjective perspective of reality. So at some point in time, all possible outcomes of a given cause and effect instance actually do happen. Somewhere. Somewhen.

So in that early fraction of a nanosecond of the big bang, not only was this universe created, but all possible universes began. Like branches of a tree, all the different variable possibilities that could have happen actually did happen, and each of these finite universes went on another fraction of a nanosecond, each almost identical except for the one difference of that previous fraction of a nanosecond where the possibilities shifted, and then each of those alternate realities came to another fork in the road where any possible thing that could happen would happen, and the universes diverged once again into a greater but still finite number of alternate realities. By the second full second after the big bang, we're still talking a finite number of alternate realities, but it's a big finite number. And a lot of subatomic particles. And a lot of possibilities. And each fraction of a nanosecond that went by after that increased the numbers exponentially. So today, billions of years after the big bang, everything that could have possibly happened between then and now has happened. Somewhere. Somewhen. So every fictitious work that is plausible enough for you to believe while you're reading it, has happened, is happening or will happen in one of those other alternate realities. If one is to believe in the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics, then one has to believe in an infinite universe in which everything, and I mean everything, is not only possible, but probable to a calulatable degree.

Not only is our planet a pale blue dot in a nearly infinite black abyss of space, but it's one of billions of Earths, in billions of universes, and somewhere between now and the end of time, there will have been a literal infinity of possible alternate realities played out simultaneously. Somewhere. Somewhen. However, if Charles Dickens didn't mention you in any of his books, and if Ray Bradbury never got around to mentioning that in his worlds of The Illustrated Man there wasn't a story that described a book called The Illustrated Man being read by you, in that world, those authors were talking about other realities in which you did not participate, so that is why the alternate worlds in science fiction are never your world. There is probably another you in that world doing something else entirely, but that's an entirely different quagmire which I'll save for some other node maybe, someday.

By the way, all this gets negated if you happen to ever read the above words while taking enough of the appropriate drugs which would somehow help you make any sense out of all this absurd crap.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.