Advisory: I am not a scientist, so it’s entirely possible that I have this all wrong.
I occasionally bore people with a story about a discussion I once had with an old friend about something that happened to us when we were much younger.
The intriguing thing, to me at least, was that she and I remembered the details very differently. Neither of us had a reason to remember it differently — in neither version was it an incident that put either of us in a bad light — but we did. Had it been a matter of consequence, which is wasn’t, we could have both sworn in a court of law that our version of events was the correct one.
But how could this be, that two sensible people without agendas, had recollections that were entirely at odds?
In this piece in the Huffington Post, Dr Robert Lanza says some scientists are now suggesting that the past is not a fixed thing, and that whether things actually occurred in the past may depend on events in the future.
Imagine the ramifications of this — and not just for the scriptwriters of Doctor Who. For example, that lie you told the wife about what you were doing last night may not have been a lie, because the past isn’t set in stone.
On a more serious level, a person convicted of and punished for a crime may, in fact, prove to be innocent once the past is properly played out. Perhaps those thought dead may, in fact, turn out to be alive. It’s intriguing, and scary stuff.
But wait, there’s more. Some scientists believe in the theory of parallel universes. And some people have taken this to mean that there are multiple, perhaps infinite, but different versions of our “reality” out there — in which case, presumably, there are many pasts and many futures.
This creates a whole new raft of mindblowing possibilities. As Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory puts it: “You know, it just occurred to me, if there are an infinite number of parallel universes, in one of them, there’s probably a Sheldon who doesn’t believe parallel universes exist.”
Or, as I put it, “There’s a Brett out there who’s having a lot more fun than me. And I’m envious.”
(An earlier — or, perhaps, later — version of this post may have appeared on debritz.net in January 2012)
