There Is No "You" In a Parallel Universe

StartsWithABang (3485481) writes "Ever since quantum mechanics first came along, we've recognized how tenuous our perception of reality is, and how — in many ways — what we perceive is just a very small subset of what's going on at the quantum level in our Universe. Then, along came cosmic inflation, teaching us that our observable Universe is just a tiny, tiny fraction of the matter-and-radiation filled space out there, with possibilities including Universes with different fundamental laws and constants, differing quantum outcomes existing in disconnected regions of space, and even the fantastic one of parallel Universes and alternate versions of you and me. But is that last one really admissible? The best modern evidence teaches us that even with all the Universes that inflation creates, it's still a finite number, and an insufficiently large number to contain all the possibilities that a 13.8 billion year old Universe with 10^90 particles admits."

Comments

Re:Parallel

[Immerman]

You are ignoring the process by which words acquire historical definitions. "Atom" for example literally means something that cannot be further divided - something which clearly does not apply to something composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Nevertheless, by the time we realized that atoms could in fact be divided further the meaning of "smallest particle of an element" had become well established, and thus we continued to use the word even though it was clearly a lie.

Similarly "universe" had come to mean "the expanse of spacetime which obeys the geometries and physical laws with which we are familiar and which was causally connected with us at some point in the past" long before we realized that the whole of the cosmos is likely far vaster and stranger than we can possibly imagine or ever hope to observe.