Now for something just a little more heavy duty …

I’m intrigued by multiverses, one version being that every possibility that exists in any and every moment could exist somewhere, spawning an infinite number of universes. We’re only aware of the one of which we’re a part. Robert Frost wrote about the road less travelled. Imagine each road as a universe. It would be simple if there were two roads. But we know there could be many, infinitely many, diverging out from each of our lives, from everyone’s life.

It’s possible to challenge free will on the grounds that every action is pre-determined, every action whether human or physical has an inevitability. But according to quantum theory many possibilities exist, nothing is therefore inevitable, and it’s only the act of observation, when a wave function collapses, that crystallises a moment, and then it’s the case that ‘all actions [that a wave function allows] will actually occur’.

Even more does this make my own life unique: the thought that could be countless other ‘me’s, generated each nano-second of my existence.

I may worry about my identity, and losing it at my death, but I could have countless identities. It’s simply that we don’t know about each other.

Buddhism allows for this possibility. There is no restriction on births in time or indeed space. But there is no place for karma in quantum physics! And rebirths in Buddhism could eventually lead to enlightenment, and there is no enlightenment in a quantum world. Just extraordinary and infinite subdivisions of time and space .

And that is my thought for the day.

There is still a place for karma, and rebirths, if you believe in them. Mathematicians may explore and explain other possible universes, an infinity of them, but we have the world as we live and experience it.

So, much as I wonder over Schrodinger’s cat, and achieve a feeble half- or quarter-understanding, I’m in the end content to wake each morning and wonder at this extraordinary world of which we’re apart.

One world is wonder enough.