Universes: Parallel or Unique? (Part 1)

People have enjoyed playing with the notion of parallel universes for many years. Science fiction stories have featured myriad possibilities of the existence of them, and often describe a hero accidentally being dumped into one of them, followed by harrowing and strange adventures. Our hero will discover the weird characteristics of the new universe, become trapped within it, finally escape, and return safely home, back to our unique universe. It's been a rich topic to explore.

One of the more modern fictional depictions of parallel universes is the notion that multiple, split-off copies of each of us exists in these countless other universes. How does this happen? At each moment, we are presented with multiple choices; the road branches again and again. We choose one path, but other copies of us (in other universes) make other choices, each time creating endless copies of ourselves that do their own thing in their own universe. These replicas of us carry on in their lives pretty much as we do, but pursue an infinite number of alternative possibilities.

After each moment's decision that we make, we sometimes wonder: What if I were to have chosen another path? (The fun part of the fiction is that another “me” did so, in another parallel universe.) What would my life be like today? If only I could peer into one of those alternative worlds. These fanciful questions often occur to us, and we can get into daydreams about another path that we might have taken. Another playground for science fiction.

Once the sole realm of science fiction, the possibility of the existence of parallel universes has entered mainstream science in recent years. Parallel universes pop up in physics and cosmology in several ways. One of the ways is via the field of quantum mechanics. Its predecessor, classical mechanics (the result of Isaac Newton's insights), described an exact, unique universe—in which the laws of physics allowed us to make precise predictions of the future behavior of things such as planets and billiard balls. Given enough information, one could describe precisely where that planet would be in a hundred million years, or in which pocket a billiard ball would eventually drop. Classical mechanics offered a certainty that we humans like to have.

But then quantum mechanics entered the picture and introduced the fact that chance, instead, may rule our beloved universe. Physics was transformed from an exact science to a probabilistic one. (This irked the hell out of some scientists... Einstein was one of them.) Quantum mechanics tells us that an event, rather than being unique, may have any number of outcomes—each with a given probability of happening. We won't know what outcome actually will occur, until we run the experiment. Afterwards, we may wonder why that particular result occurred. Another outcome theoretically could have happened. This probabilistic nature of the quantum world posits the possibility of multiply-different outcomes in multiply-different universes—each outcome equally likely to have occurred in its own universe. Weird!

More on alternative universes next time...

Icy Dog

Is this ice in the creek or Snoopy the dog? (Click to enlarge.)

Scarce as Hen's Teeth

Most everyone knows that birds come with a hard beak, empty of any teeth. Thus the old saying I often heard my mom say, when something couldn't be found: “It's as scarce as hen's teeth.” Little did Mom know that hens—or, rather their deep ancestral forebears—once did have teeth. In fact, those toothy critters were birds' very deep ancestors (actually, dinosaurs), who lived over 100 million years ago.

In that ancient time the ancestors of today's birds were small, toothed dinosaurs that cohabited the planet with the really big toothy dinosaurs, like the formidable T-Rex. A great many species of dinosaurs presided over all living creatures on Earth, until that fateful day when an asteroid crashed down near the Mexican Gulf coast, 65 million years ago. The resultant disruption to Earth's climate soon wiped out the great dinos, but the smaller, feathered ones managed to squeak through.

Well before that asteroid crash, however, those bird ancestors had already lost their teeth. How do we know? New genetic analyses show that the toothed dinos long ago first lost their teeth at the front of their jaw, and the tooth loss then gradually moved rearward on the jaw. As this loss progressed, the hard beak slowly developed (I guess to give them something hard to mash their food with).

Bird evolution continued to occur, as the proto-birds also evolved flight feathers and even began to sing. As a fascinating example of how genes are shared across species (good evidence that we all co-evolved from even more primitive critters), the 50 or so genes that permitted birds to begin to sing are shared by us humans. These genes give us the ability to speak—and yes, sing, but certainly not like a bird.

But back to hen's teeth: Was a toothless bird more suited for surviving the asteroid impact than the dentally-equipped large dinosaurs? It was more likely a case of their larger size and the over-specialization of the huge dinos that did them in. In any case, the surviving proto-birds found countless available niches, after their dino cousins disappeared. When many niches are available, a species can rapidly multiply into many new species. That's why Earth currently supports more than 10,000 species of birds.

So, the proliferation of birds happened because the big dinosaurs, some 65 million years ago, became scarcer than hen's teeth.

Woodpecker Work

This guy was either undecided or overworked. (Click to enlarge.)

Outwitting Ourselves

There is a barrage of new findings currently being published by psychological researchers. It's even sort of a golden age, as constantly-improving brain-scanning techniques allow neuroscientists and psychologists to probe deep into the brain and make connections between our behaviors and our brain states.

One area that has yielded some fascinating findings is the manner in which we can be deceitful. We all know that honesty is the best policy—we've had this message handed to us throughout our lives by parents, teachers, and religious leaders. Yet every one of us has to admit to behaving deceptively at times. Why do we do this? Primarily to fool others, to take advantage of them. We often find ourselves in competition with other people—for food, sex, winning games, etc.; and we want to win. If we strut around in a posturing manner, we may hoodwink our competition into concluding that we're much more gallant and fierce-some than we really are. We've gotten the upper hand, before any real competition has begun.

An interesting twist on this game is that we're really not quite as dishonest as we appear to be, because we're not always intentionally deceitful. Sometimes we do it because we've deceived ourselves first. We tell ourselves lies, in order that our lies to others don't seem to be quite so unscrupulous. If we ourselves believe this stuff, others will be more likely to swallow it, and we won't feel all that guilty.

But how can we be so disingenuous, and how do we manage to live with ourselves, when we deceive other people and ourselves as much as we do? If we know that honesty is the best policy, won't our conscience tend to bother us? Well, if we've fooled ourselves into believing our own falsehoods, we don't even realize we're being dishonest.

What's the mechanism going on here? How can we not comprehend that we've duped even ourselves? (Of course, we don't do this all the time, or our lives would be phony and unreal.)

It all begins with our senses, which have evolved to give us a very accurate view of reality. If not, we'd probably not survive, and evolution would have done away with humans long ago. So our senses provide us with a good sample of the world. The problem occurs in the brain. Our ultimate perception of our world is what our brain makes it out to be—what it decides all those electrical signals delivered to the brain mean. Accuracy is not maintained if the signals get degraded or scrambled. And accuracy is lost in the process of making memories. How?

Much of our conception of our world is based on memories. Something happens. We perceive it in some manner, and then stash it in memory—to later retrieve it when we need it. The experiences we have range all over the place—from good to bad, painful to thrilling, sad to joyful, scary to comforting. Our brain will sometimes distort our memory of these experiences—by making them more to our liking. We repress painful memories, create false memories, sugar coat memories, and choose to notice only those things that feed our biases.

These distortions of our memories are often unconsciously formed, so that our conscious mind—unaware of the falsification of a memory—hangs onto it, as if it were valid. We've outwitted ourselves, and in the process, we may fool others as well.