Thursday, October 25, 2007

Juicing The Multiverse

When I first read this article:

Parallel Universes Exist http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=paUniverse_sun14_parallel_universes&show_article=1&cat=0

I thought, "Hey, that's pretty cool!" As I imagine a lot of other science fiction geeks did. But a couple of weeks ago, a thought struck me:

Where does all the energy come from?

I'm no physicist but something about this doesn't make sense to me. Maybe there's some answer that's obvious to physicists, somewhere in those heavy-duty scientific papers that I never read. Maybe they don't feel the need to mention it in articles geared toward the layman who might not question it. If anyone can tell me the answer, please, have at it. I encourage you to make me look foolish, because I'd like to know.

Where does all the energy come from for all those branching universes? How about those laws of thermodynamics? Do they still have those? Is reality not perturbed by the sudden energy drain needed to instantly create an entire universe every time I choose between the red M&M and the brown one?

With the amount of decisions being made by every human and who knows how many other intelligent (or even non-intelligent) life forms, and the amount of possible outcomes for every mundane act and molecular dance, there must be trillions of trillions of trillions of universes being created every picosecond. That's a lot of juice, my friends. According to my admittedly tenuous grasp of science, it's impossible for even the amount of energy needed to power my lawn mower for an hour to pop into existence out of nowhere. How do those other universes do it?

If parallel universes must exist, then there is a mechanism in place for creating energy out of nothing. If that's true, then maybe any one particular universe doesn't have to die a heat death at the end of its normal life cycle. If we, or any sufficiently advanced beings, figure out how to access those other universes, we can take some of their energy for ourselves. If we steal a lit candle from Dimension X, our universe will have more energy than it started with.

If you don't think quantum physics is some crazy shit, certainly, you've got to think this is. Somebody explain!

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