“The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” - Muriel Rukeyser
A coin is flipped through the air. It spirals down and lands tail side up. But what if, mid-rotation, the universe split? One world where the coin lands heads, one where it lands tails.
This is the Many-worlds interpretation, in its simplest form. Theorized by Hugh Everett in the 1950s (with an earlier assist from Erwin Schrödinger and his feline), it postulates that the universe splits into parallel versions of itself when faced with quantum choice. Theoretical physicist Bryce DeWitt described it as “every quantum transition taking place in every star, in every galaxy, in every remote corner of the universe is splitting our local world on Earth into myriad copies of itself.