Breaking the world in two

It's no revelation to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I'm fascinated with quantum physics.

In fact, some years ago I was in the car with my younger son, then about 17, and we were discussing the difference between the Many-Worlds and the Copenhagen Interpretation of the collapse of the wave function (as one does), and he said something that led to my writing my time-travel novel, Lock & Key: "What if there was a place that kept track of all the possible outcomes, for every decision anyone makes?"

And thus was born the Library of Possibilities, and its foul-mouthed, Kurt-Cobain-worshiping Head Librarian, Archibald Fischer.

The Many-Worlds Interpretation -- which, put simply, surmises that at every point where any decision could have gone two or more ways, the universe splits -- has always fascinated me, but at the same point, it does seem to fall into Wolfgang Pauli's category of "not even wrong."  It's not falsifiable, because at every bifurcation, the two universes become effectively walled off from each other, so we wouldn't be able to prove or disprove the claim either way.  (This hasn't stopped fiction writers like me from capitalizing on the possibility of jumping from one to the other; this trope has been the basis of dozens of plot lines in Star Trek alone, where Geordi LaForge was constantly having to rescue crew members who fell through a rip in the space-time continuum.)

So it was with great curiosity that I read an article written by physicist Sean Carroll that appeared in Literary Hub last week, that looks at the possible outcome in our own universe if Many-Worlds turns out to be true -- and a way to use quantum mechanics as a basis for making choices.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Carroll writes:

[Keep in mind] the importance of treating individuals on different branches of the wave function as distinct persons, even if they descended from the same individual in the past.  There is an important asymmetry between how we think about “our future” versus “our past” in Many-Worlds, which ultimately can be attributed to the low-entropy condition of our early universe. 

Any one individual can trace their lives backward in a unique person, but going forward in time we will branch into multiple people.  There is not one future self that is picked out as "really you," and it’s equally true that there is no one person constituted by all of those future individuals.  They are separate, as much as identical twins are distinct people, despite descending from a single zygote. 

We might care about what happens to the versions of ourselves who live on other branches, but it’s not sensible to think of them as "us."

Carrol's point is whether, if you buy Many-Worlds, we should concern ourselves with the consequences of our decisions.  After all, if every possible outcome happens in some universe somewhere -- if everything that can happen, will happen -- then the net result of our decision-making is exactly zero.  If in this branch, you make the decision to rob a bank, and in the other, you decide not to, this is precisely the same outcome as if you decided not to in this branch and your counterpart decided to go through with the robbery in the other one.  But as Carroll points out, while it doesn't make any overall difference if you take into account every possible universe, that's a perspective none of us actually have.  Your decision in this branch does matter to you (well, at least I hope it does), and it certainly has consequences for your future in the universe you inhabit -- as well as restricting what choices are available to you for later decision-making.

 If you'd like to play a little with the idea of Many-Worlds, you can turn your decision-making over to a purely quantum process via an app for iPhones called "Universe Splitter."  You ask the app a two-option question -- Carroll's example is, "Should I have pepperoni or sausage on my pizza tonight?" -- and the app sends a signal to a physics lab in Switzerland, where a photon is sent through a beam-splitter with detectors on either side.  If the photon goes to the left, you're told to go with option 1 (pepperoni), and if to the right, option 2 (sausage).  So here, as in the famous Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment, the outcome is decided by the actual collapse of an actual wave function, and if you buy Many-Worlds, you've now chopped the universe in two because of your choice of pizza toppings.

What I wonder about, though, is that after you get the results, the decision-making isn't over; you've just added one more step.  Once you get the results, you have to decide whether or not to abide by them, so once again you've split the universe (into "abide by the decision" and "don't" branches).  How many of us have put a decision up to a flip of the coin, then when the results come in, think, "That's not the outcome I wanted" and flip the coin again?  What's always bothered me about Many-Worlds is that it's an embarrassment of riches.  We're constantly engaging in situations that could go one of two or more ways, so within moments, the number of possible outcomes in the entire universe becomes essentially infinite.  Physicists tend to be (rightly) suspicious of infinities, and this by itself makes me dubious about Many-Worlds.  (I deliberately glossed over this point in Lock & Key, and implied that all human choices could be catalogued in a library -- albeit a very, very large one.  That may be the single biggest whopper I've told in any of my fiction, even though as a speculative fiction writer my stock in trade is playing fast-and-loose with the universe as it is.)

Carroll is fully aware of how bizarre the outcome of Many-Worlds is, even though (by my understanding) he appears to be in favor of that interpretation over the seemingly-arbitrary Copenhagen Interpretation.  He says -- and this quote seems as fitting a place to stop as any:

Even for the most battle-hardened quantum physicist, one must admit that this sounds ludicrous.  But it’s the most straightforward reading of our best understanding of quantum mechanics.   

The question naturally arises: What should we do about it?  If the real world is truly this radically different from the world of our everyday experience, does this have any implications for how we live our lives?

Largely—no. To each individual on some branch of the wave function, life goes on just as if they lived in a single world with truly stochastic quantum events...  As counterintuitive as Many-Worlds might seem, at the end of the day it doesn’t really change how we should go through our lives.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is by the team of Mark Carwardine and the brilliant author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the late Douglas Adams.  Called Last Chance to See, it's about a round-the-world trip the two took to see the last populations of some of the world's most severely endangered animals, including the Rodrigues Fruit Bat, the Mountain Gorilla, the Aye-Aye, and the Komodo Dragon.  It's fascinating, entertaining, and sad, as Adams and Carwardine take an unflinching look at the devastation being wrought on the world's ecosystems by humans.

But it should be required reading for anyone interested in ecology, the environment, and the animal kingdom. Lucid, often funny, always eye-opening, Last Chance to See will give you a lens into the plight of some of the world's rarest species -- before they're gone forever.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Multiverse massacre

By now, most of you have heard about the Bowling Green Massacre, a horrific attack by Iraqi immigrant terrorists in Bowling Green, Kentucky, which Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway cited as yet another reason we shouldn't accept Muslim immigrants into the United States.  "I bet it’s brand new information to people that President Obama had a six-month ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized and were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre," Conway said.  "Most people don't know that because it didn't get covered."

Well, as everyone in the United States, with the possible exception of Donald Trump, knows by now is that the reason it didn't get covered is that it never happened.  Kellyanne Conway, whose job description seems to include "make up random shit if it supports what Trump is currently doing," eventually admitted that she'd "made an honest mistake," which is apparently how this administration is labeling outright, bald-faced lies.  The admission, however, didn't stop her from being excoriated on social media.

And also:

Or, best of all, if you'd prefer a twofer:

But because there's no story so weird that people can't work together to make it way weirder, just a couple of days ago claims began popping up on woo-woo websites claiming that yes, actually there was a Bowling Green Massacre, it just happened in an alternate timeline that for some reason only a few of us remember.

Thus, we can add the Bowling Green Massacre to the Berenstain Bears and Nelson Mandela's untimely death as another example of... the Mandela Effect.

The Mandela Effect, you probably know, is a phenomenon wherein someone (or several someones) recalls the past differently than the rest of us, and rather than doing what most of us do, which is to say, "Huh.  I guess I'm remembering wrong, then," said individuals decide that what happened is they have side-slipped into our world from an alternate path in the multiverse in which the event in question (such as the annoyingly moralistic cartoon bears being the Berenstein, rather than Berenstain, Bears) actually is reality.

Here's how one commenter describes his confusion over the imaginary Massacre:

I know the press is (unfairly?) hammering Kellyanne Conway about this and everyone just assumes she made it up, but does anyone else remember an actual Bowling Green Massacre? 

And I’m not talking about the arms smuggling scheme or whatever that all of the articles I’ve read seem to think she might have been talking about.  I mean an actual, honest-to-goodness terrorist attack. 

I definitely recall a bombing in Bowling Green that killed … maybe a dozen people?  I think it happened either at the end of the Bush administration or the first month of the Obama administration.  I’m pretty sure it involved a suicide bomb being set off on a city bus.  The way I remember it was a young Muslim guy–he could have been in his late teens, possibly early twenties? (I’m ashamed to admit this, but I remember seeing his pictures on the news and thinking he was kind of cute.)  He hid an IED inside a dufflebag or knapsack or something and I think he detonated it using an ipod or some kind of portable music player. 

Later, they arrested a second, older Muslim guy.  I think he was responsible for building the bomb.  They were definitely both Iraqi refugees, like Conway said.

Which all sounds pretty persuasive, except for the fact that -- allow me to reiterate -- none of it happened.  But dozens of people chimed in about how yeah, they remember it too, and they added more details about the attackers and the victims and the aftermath, and the whole thing is showing every sign of snowballing.

So I guess there is no end to the mental gymnastics people will go through to avoid being wrong about stuff.  Me, I tend to agree more with Neil deGrasse Tyson: "We have a high opinion of our own brain as a data processing device, when in fact we should not."  Experiment after experiment have shown that our recollection of the past is incomplete at best and full of false memories at worst.  For me, the Ockham's Razor-ish explanation requiring the least ad hoc assumptions is that we're really prone to remembering things wrong, and some of us (e.g. Kellyanne Conway) make the problem significantly worse by inventing new fake stuff to confuse us further.

Of course, there'll be those that disagree with me.  The multiverse is real, and there's a parallel timeline in which Kellyanne Conway doesn't lie every time she opens her mouth.  Those of us who don't recall the Massacre simply live in what one person referred to as a "BGM-null universe."

Or, as I like to think of it, reality.

Quantum leap

Every once in a while, the targeted-ad software that decides which advertisement to paste to which website screws up, and you'll see something so poorly placed that it's comical.  This happened yesterday, when the software evidently picked up words from my blog like "psychic" and "quantum" and "alternate universes" without picking up words like "nonsense" and "bullshit," and pasted an advertisement for "Quantum Jumping" at the end of my last post.

Naturally I had to click on the link, and was greeted by a banner headline that said, "Jump into a universe of infinite possibilities."  I thought at first that they were speaking metaphorically, that whatever your situation, you can change your life's trajectory -- but no.  Apparently these people are really claiming that the 80s science fiction series Quantum Leap was a scientific documentary, and that if you don't like your current life, you can just leap into a different universe.

Here's a direct quote:

Since the 1920s, quantum physicists have been trying to make sense of an uncomfortable and startling fact -- that an infinite number of alternate universes exist.  Leading scientists like Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, and Neil Turok, all of whom are responsible for life-changing breakthroughs in the field of quantum physics, have all suggested the existence of multiple universes...  This jaw-dropping discovery was first made when, trying to pinpoint the exact location of an atomic particle, physicists found it was virtually impossible.  It had no single location.  In other words, atomic particles have the ability to simultaneously exist in more than one place at a time.  The only explanation for this is that particles don’t only exist in our universe -- They can spark into existence in an infinite number of parallel universes as well.  And although these particles come to being and change in synchronicity, they are all slightly different...  Drawing on the above-mentioned scientific theory and merging it with 59 years of study into mysticism and the human mind, Burt Goldman has come to one shocking conclusion: In these alternate universes, alternate versions of you are living out their lives.

To make a long, drawn-out explanation a little shorter, Goldman claims that through his training course (downloadable for $97, or available on DVDs starting at $197) you can mentally slide into these alternate universes, meet alternate versions of yourself, and learn from them.  It is how, he explains, he learned how to paint, to write, and (presumably) to market a serious bill of goods to the gullible.

Well, first of all, he evidently learned his physics from watching Lost in Space reruns, because the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (which I believe is what he is referencing when he mentions particles not having single locations) has nothing to do with things "sparking into existence in an infinite number of parallel universes."  What he's talking about is the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is a fascinating way of resolving the Schrödinger's cat paradox.  It says, in essence, that whenever a particle's wave function collapses (it is localized in one position), it splits the universe -- and in those alternate universes, the particle was localized in every other possible position it could have occupied.

[image courtesy of Christian Schirm and the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, while the Many-Worlds interpretation is intriguing, and has been the subject of thousands of plot twists on Star Trek alone, it has never been demonstrated experimentally.  (It's also the basis of my recently-released novel Lock & Key, available in fine bookstores everywhere, but which I feel obligated to point out is fiction.)  Most physicists believe that even if this interpretation is correct, those theoretical alternate universes are "closed off" to us permanently after the event that caused the split, and therefore such experimental verification is impossible by definition.  Thus, this model remains an interesting, but untestable, idea.

But the thing that pissed me off the most about the site was the namedropping.  Using quotes from such luminaries as Hawking, Kaku, Max Planck, Nikola Tesla, and various others is both unfair to those quoted (who, I suspect, would laugh Goldman's ideas out of the room) and is also Appeal to Authority in its worst form.  If I were one of the scientists quoted, I'd be pretty perturbed.

I also find it interesting that he claims that you can learn from your alternate selves, because in some universe you are a published author, a rock star, or a Nobel-prize-winning scientist.  Just given the law of averages, wouldn't you also expect that it's a 50-50 chance that in any given alternate universe, you'd be instead a bum, a felon, or dead?  Although, to be fair, I'd guess that you'd learn something from meeting those alternate selves, too.  It's like James Randi's criticism of mediums; that all of the dead relatives these people contact seem to have ended up in heaven.  Never once does a medium say to the subject, "Um, bad news... Great-Uncle George ended up in hell.  He's sort of, um, unavailable at the moment."

However, I'd like to look more closely at something I saw on another website, one critical of Goldman and his claims. The post by the critic launched something of a comment-war between people who agreed with the skeptic, and those who thought Goldman's ideas were reasonable. The most interesting comment, I think, was the following:

Why are you bashing Quantum Jumping?  Maybe he's wrong about how it works, but who cares, as long as it does work?  If it can make someone's life better, then there's nothing wrong with what he's doing.

It probably goes without saying that I disagree with this (but I'm going to say it, anyhow).  The main point is that Goldman's claim states that other selves in other universes actually, honestly, truly exist, and he is actually, honestly, truly going to put you into direct contact with them.  Despite the testimonials, there is no evidence that this claim has any merit whatsoever.  So if his technique is really a visualization/actualization method -- the same as many others available out there -- then he should market it as such, and drop all of the bullshit about quantum physics and alternate universes.  Of course, he won't do that; mentioning Hawking and Kaku and the rest gives him credibility, and (most importantly) it sells DVDs.

Now, if you buy it, and it improves your life, allows you to accomplish things you otherwise would not have been able to do, then I'm glad for you.  But the fact remains that what Goldman is saying is false.  And honestly, if you accomplished wonderful things using his program, I strongly suspect you would have been able to do them equally well without it.

What it boils down to is a point I've made more than once: telling the truth matters.  The world is what it is, and scientists and other skeptics are trying their best to elucidate how it works.  When a huckster like Goldman comes along, and tries to convince you otherwise -- and makes lots of money at your expense in the process -- it is simple dishonesty, and is no more to be respected than were the peddlers of miraculous tonics in the 19th century.  Like those tonics, Quantum Jumping is so much snake oil -- and as usual, caveat emptor.

A bear of a question

What never ceases to astound me is the way woo-woos use minuscule amounts of evidence to support claims that under most circumstances would qualify a person for serious medical supervision.

It's a combination of confirmation bias (accepting slim support for beliefs you already accepted) and completely ignoring the ECREE principle (Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence).  And it never fails to baffle me, however often I run across it.

I ran into an especially good example of this maddening tendency just yesterday, with a claim that humanity is currently in an alternate time line.  And the evidence that we live in a bizarro world comes from...

The Berenstain Bears.

Yes, the annoying, moralistic cartoon bears, intended to entertain kids with their antics and simultaneously hammer into their brains important lessons such as Be Nice To Your Siblings and Your Parents Are Always Right and Strangers Are Scary and Pay Attention In School Or You Are Bad.

And how, you are probably asking, do said Bears show that we have side-slipped into an alternate universe?

It's because recently, people have been spelling their name "Berenstein" instead of the correct spelling,"Berenstain."

I'm not making this up.  In a post called "The Berenst#in Bears Problem," writer Rob Schwartz tells us why this constitutes proof:

…somehow, at some time in the last 10 years or so, reality has been tampered with and history has been retroactively changed. The bears really were called the ‘BerenstEin Bears’ when we were growing up, but now reality has been altered such that the name of the bears has been changed post hoc…In 1992 they were “stEin” in 1992, but in 2012 they were “stAin” in 1992... we moved to the stAin hexadectant, while our counterparts moved to our hexadectant (stEin). They are standing around expressing their confusion about the ‘Berenstein Bears’ and how they all remember “Berenstain Bears” on the covers growing up.

 So my first question about this, besides the obvious question of "What the fuck?", was, "what is a 'hexadectant?'"  When I looked it up, I found this:

The "universes" of my theory are region of a 4D complex manifold that split along lines of real/imaginary. They're really more like "pockets" than universes, or as I call them... "hexadectants." Obviously we don't observe complex spatial dimensions. The most obvious explanation is simply that spacetime isn't complex. Yet if (if) spacetime is complex, then why don't we? Well, maybe it's due to splitting along real/imaginary components to the dimensions. So, in our pocket things are (1,1,1,i), but in another they might be (1,i,1,1) or (i,i,i,1). But then what's going on in the other pockets? Well, maybe there's people there, just like us, experiencing the exact same special relativity but with a different sign convention. And then what if somehow our Euler-phase changed and we wound up in one of the other pockets? 

I don't think it's a crazy proposal.

Righty-o.  The Berensta/e/in Bears prove that we're in the universe's alternate pocket, or something.  Not crazy at all.  As a science-type, though, I object to his calling this a "theory;" a theory makes predictions that are testable, and this one says that somewhere else in an alternate universe there's another Gordon who is British and calls this blog Sceptophilia, but you can't visit that universe because it's in a different pocket, and therefore, somehow, q.e.d.

Because the whole Bear issue couldn't have been caused by people misspelling their name, or anything.  It's not because virtually every Germanic name with an ending pronounced that way spells it "-stein," so a lot of people get confused and remember the "-stain" wrong.

No.  If there's a common spelling error, it has to be evidence of an alternate universe.

So anyway.  I wonder if the alternate me has a headache right now?  Because I certainly do, given the number of faceplants I've done while researching and writing this.  I think I'll sign off here, to see if I can find some ibuprofin or asperin or tylanol.

Life at the center

Appeal to Authority is simultaneously one of the simplest, and one of the trickiest, of the fallacies.

The simple part is that one shouldn't rely on someone else's word for a claim, without some demonstration of evidence in support.  Just saying "Stephen Hawking said so" isn't sufficient proof for a conjecture.

On the other hand, there are times when relying on authority makes sense.  If I claimed that Stephen Hawking was wrong in the realm of abstruse quantum phenomena, the likelihood of my being wrong myself is nearly 100%.  Expertise is worth something, and Stephen Hawking's Ph.D. in physics certainly gives his statements in that field considerable gravitas.

The problem is that when confronted with a confident-sounding authority, people turn their own brains off.  And the situation becomes even murkier when experts in one field start making pronouncements in a different one.

Take, for example, Robert Lanza, a medical researcher whose work in stem cells and regenerative medicine has led to groundbreaking advances in the treatment of hitherto incurable diseases.  His contributions to medical science are undeniably profound, and I would consider his opinion in the field of stem cell research about as close to unimpeachable as you could get.  But Lanza hasn't been content to stay within his area of specialization, and has ventured forth into the fringe areas of metaphysics -- joining people like Fritjof Capra in their quest to show that quantum physics has something to say about consciousness, souls, and life after death.

Let's start with Lanza's idea of a "biocentric universe," which is defined thusly:

Biocentrism states that life and biology are central to being, reality, and the cosmos— life creates the universe rather than the other way around. It asserts that current theories of the physical world do not work, and can never be made to work, until they fully account for life and consciousness. While physics is considered fundamental to the study of the universe, and chemistry fundamental to the study of life, biocentrism claims that scientists will need to place biology before the other sciences to produce a theory of everything.

Which puts me in mind of Wolfgang Pauli's famous quote, "This isn't right.  This isn't even wrong."  Biocentrism isn't really a scientific theory, in that it makes no predictions, and therefore de facto isn't falsifiable.  And Lanza's reception on this topic has been chilly at best.  Physicist Lawrence Krauss said, "It may represent interesting philosophy, but it doesn't look, at first glance, as if it will change anything about science."  Physicist and science writer David Lindley agrees, calling biocentrism "a vague, inarticulate metaphor."

And if you needed further evidence of its lack of scientific rigor, I must also point out that Deepak Chopra loves biocentrism.  "(Lanza's) theory of biocentrism is consistent with the most ancient wisdom traditions of the world which says that consciousness conceives, governs, and becomes a physical world," Chopra writes.  "It is the ground of our Being in which both subjective and objective reality come into existence."

As a scientist, you know you're in trouble if you get support from Chopra.

And there's a further problem with venturing outside of your field of expertise.  If you make unsupported claims, then others will take your claims (with your name appended to them, of course) and send them even further out into the ether.  Which is what happened recently over at the site Learning Mind, where Lanza's ideas were said to prove that the soul exists, and death is an illusion:

(Lanza's) theory implies that death simply does not exist.  It is an illusion which arises in the minds of people.  It exists because people identify themselves with their body.  They believe that the body is going to perish, sooner or later, thinking their consciousness will disappear too.   

In fact, consciousness exists outside of constraints of time and space.  It is able to be anywhere: in the human body and outside of it.  That fits well with the basic postulates of quantum mechanics science, according to which a certain particle can be present anywhere and an event can happen according to several, sometimes countless, ways. 

Lanza believes that multiple universes can exist simultaneously.  These universes contain multiple ways for possible scenarios to occur.  In one universe, the body can be dead.  And in another it continues to exist, absorbing consciousness which migrated into this universe.  This means that a dead person while traveling through the same tunnel ends up not in hell or in heaven, but in a similar world he or she once inhabited, but this time alive.  And so on, infinitely.

Which amounts to taking an untestable claim, whose merits are best left to the philosophers to discuss, and running right off a cliff with it.

As I've said more than once: quantum mechanics isn't some kind of fluffy, hand-waving speculation.  It is hard, evidence-based science.  The mathematical model that is the underpinning of this description of the universe is complex and difficult for the layperson to understand, but it is highly specific.  It describes the behavior of particles and waves, on the submicroscopic scale, making predictions that have been experimentally supported time after time.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And that's all it does.  Quantum effects such as superposition, indeterminacy, and entanglement have extremely limited effects on the macroscopic world.  Particle physics has nothing to say about the existence of the soul, the afterlife, or any other religious or philosophical claim.  And even the "Many Worlds" hypothesis, which was seriously put forth as a way to explain the collapse of the wave function, has largely been shelved by everyone but the science fiction writers because its claims are completely untestable.

To return to my original point, Appeal to Authority is one of those fallacies that seem simpler than they actually turn out to be.  I have no doubt that Robert Lanza is a genius in the field of regenerative medicine, and I wouldn't hesitate to trust what he says in that realm.  But his pronouncements in the field of physics appear to me to be unfalsifiable speculation -- i.e., not scientific statements.  As such, biocentrism is no better than "intelligent design."  What Adam Lee, of Daylight Atheism, said about intelligent design could be applied equally well to biocentrism:

(A) hypothesis must make predictions that can be compared to the real world and determined to be either true or false, and there must be some imaginable evidence that could disprove it.  If an idea makes no predictions, makes predictions that cannot be unambiguously interpreted as either success or failure, or makes predictions that cannot be checked out even in principle, then it is not science.

But as such, I'm sure biocentrism is going to be as popular amongst the woo-woos as ID is amongst the fervently religious.  For them, "unfalsifiable" means "you can't prove we're wrong."

"Therefore we're right.  q.e.d. and ha ha ha."

The visitor from an alternate universe

Making its way around the internet in the last few days we have the strange story of Lerina Garcia, a Spanish woman who is making an extraordinary claim; that she has side-slipped into our world from an alternate universe, where things are similar -- but not identical -- to this one.

This story, which could come straight from a script for Star Trek: The Next Generation, would be funny if it weren't for how serious Ms. Garcia sounds about it.  Here's how her plight was described on the site All About Occult:

Lerina Garcia, a then 41-year-old woman from Spain, well-educated, came up with a rather fascinating story.  According to her, as she woke up on an unspecified day in March 2008, her eyes fell upon her bed sheets.  Strangely, they weren't the ones she remembered going to sleep to.  Neither were her pyjamas. As she decided to ignore the minute peculiarities to go to her office, the same she had been working for since 20 years, she found that the department which she called hers didn't have her name on the plate.  First she thought she had got the wrong floor, but no, everything was the same, same floor, same department, except it wasn't hers.  Then she found out she had been working in a different department altogether, for director she didn't even recognize.  Scared, she left the office on sickness grounds.

Understandably.  But the strangeness didn't end there.  In Garcia's own words (translated, obviously, into English; this is verbatim from the site, and I'm aware that some of it seems a little oddly-phrased):

6 months ago I’m not with my partner of 7 years, we left and started a relationship with a guy in my neighborhood.  I know him well, I’ve been 4 months with him and know his name, address, where he works as a child you have and where he is studying. Well, now there is this guy.  It seems that existed before my ‘jump’ but now no trace, I hired a detective to look for it and there in this ‘flat’. 

I went to a psychiatrist and attribute it to stress, believed to be hallucinations, but I know not.  My ex-boyfriend is with me as usual, I’ve never left it seems, and Augustine (my boyfriend now) seems to never have existed here, it lives in the apartment where he lived nor find his son. I swear it’s real, I am very sane.

First of all, I can't imagine living through this.  The terror must be extreme.  From the report, it sounds like Ms. Garcia is entirely sincere (i.e., not a hoaxer), although it certainly can be hard to make that judgment simply from an article.  But going on the assumption that she isn't lying outright, what are our options for an explanation?

Well, it hardly needs saying that I'm not buying that she's a visitor from an alternate universe.  The ad hoc assumptions that would be necessary for us to believe that are simply too numerous.  So I think we can safely cancel the Red Alert Status, and send Geordi LaForge et al. back to their stations.

[image courtesy of artist Christian Schirm and the Wikimedia Commons]

What I think is most likely here is that Ms. Garcia is a victim of something akin to the Capgras delusion, about which I have written before (read my original post here).  While this isn't classic Capgras -- the most common manifestation of which is a sudden conviction that everyone has been replaced by perfect duplicates -- the similarities are apparent.  And she certainly has what is the most striking thing about Capgras and other delusional disorders, which is that while the sufferer is exhibiting symptoms of serious impairment, at the same time (s)he is absolutely convinced that (s)he is entirely sane.

One of the most terrifying things about such aberrations, I think.  At least for most other disorders, you know you're sick.  Here, you're convinced that you're seeing things correctly -- and therefore, it must be everyone else who is seeing things wrong.

So for all of the people who are citing Ms. Garcia's case as proof of alternate universes and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, and so forth, I'm not finding it convincing.  It's much more likely that she had a minor stroke, perhaps in the limbic system or temporal lobe, which function together to allow for facial recognition and memory.  Rather than trumpet her case as proof of the paranormal, it might be better to see to it that she has a CT scan, and appropriate treatment for what is almost certainly a neurological disorder, not anything (literally) otherworldly.

Many worlds

I've always had a fairly good memory -- for certain things, at least.  I usually lecture my classes without notes, for example.  I find that it keeps my teaching fluid, much more so than it would be if I were just reading from a script.  (Every once in a while, though, the technique fails me, and I have to check something, or simply can't remember a particular term -- an occurrence I'm finding ever more common as I mosey my way through my 50s.)

At the same time, though, I'm constantly aware of how plastic and unreliable human memory is.  We form impressions of events, and sometimes those impressions are actually very far from correct.  The odd thing is that these pseudomemories don't seem inaccurate, or fuzzy.  My personal experience is that memories which are flat wrong seem perfectly solid -- until someone points out that facts demonstrate conclusively that what I'm remembering can't be correct.

It is this seeming certainty that is puzzling, and sometimes alarming.  A study back in 2005 by James Ost, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Portsmouth (England), demonstrated all of this with frightening clarity.  Ost took a group of volunteers in England and in Sweden, and asked them if they'd seen CCTV footage of the 2005 Tavistock Square bombing, when in fact no such footage exists.  50% of the Swedish participants said they had, and a full 84% of the English ones did!  Further, when Ost asked the volunteers who had responded "yes" for details about the video footage, they gave surprising amounts of information.  Ost asked one participant, "Was the bus moving when the bomb went off?" and received the following response: "The bus had just stopped to let two people off, when two women got on, and a man.  He placed the bag by his side, the woman sat down and doors closed.  As the bus left there was an explosion and then everyone started to scream."

So, as unsettling as it seems, a lot of what we remember didn't happen that way, or perhaps didn't happen at all.  Not a pleasant thought, but it seems like it's pretty universal to the way the human mind works.

Ost's study makes what I ran across yesterday all the more bizarre.  On a website called "The Mandela Effect," we are introduced to a woman named Fiona Broome, whose interest lies in exactly the sort of memory side-slips that Ost researched.  Her curiosity about such occurrences started when she realized how many of her acquaintances "remembered" that Nelson Mandela had died in jail -- even recalled details of his funeral from news stories they'd read.  But instead of coming to Ost's conclusion, which is that human memory is simply unreliable, Broome has reached a different explanation.

Broome thinks that these represent memories accessed from alternate realities.

"That’s not a conspiracy theory," Broome writes.  "It’s related to alternate history and parallel realities.  Exploring the quantum / 'Sliders' concept further, I discovered an entire world of shifting realities that people try to reconcile daily...  These aren’t simple errors in memory; they seem to be fully-constructed incidents (or sequential events) from the past.  They exceed the normal range of forgetfulness.  Even stranger, other people seem to have identical memories."

What are these "identical memories" that many people supposedly share?  They include:

• The deaths of Billy Graham, actors Henry Winkler, Shirley Temple, and David Soul, and televangelist Jimmy Swaggart.
• Plots and various other details on Mystery Science Theater and Star Trek: Voyager.
• Details and release dates of the movies Avatar and Terminator.
• Various PS1 games that don't exist.
• The locations of New Zealand and Sri Lanka.

And apparently, Fiona Broome and the others of her mindset actually think that all of this is better explained by their somehow accessing an "alternate universe" than it is by their simply not remembering stuff correctly.

Even if you buy the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics -- a conjecture which is far from settled amongst physicists, however many plots of science fiction movies depend on its being correct -- there's absolutely no reason to believe that we still have access to alternate timelines once splitting has occurred.  If that were true, and people could jump back and forth between universes, it kind of throws the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy right out of the window.  And that law pairs up with the Second Law of Thermodynamics as two of the most fundamental building blocks of our understanding of the universe, and -- more importantly -- they are two laws for which no exception has ever been shown.

[image of "Schrödinger's Cat and Universe Branching" courtesy of Christian Schirm and the Wikimedia Commons]

Even ardent many-worlds supporters like Hugh Everett and John Archibald Wheeler believed that once the timeline has forked, the two universes are permanently sealed off from one another.  No information, much less matter and energy, can get from one to the other, which means that if many-worlds is right, there's no way to prove it (this, in fact, is one of the main objections from detractors).  So even though timeline-jumping is a central trope in my novel Lock & Key, I am very much of the opinion that the entire idea rests on a physical impossibility (which is why the novel is filed in the "fiction" section).

Sadly, this leaves Fiona Broome et al. kind of getting sliced to ribbons by Ockham's Razor.  Bit of a shame, really, because it would be cool if we could get a glimpse of alternate universes.  It brings to mind a quote from C. S. Lewis's novel Prince Caspian:

"You mean," said Lucy rather faintly, "that it would have turned out all right – somehow?  But how?  Please, Aslan!  Am I not to know?

"To know what would have happened, child?" said Aslan.  "No. Nobody is ever told that."

It may well be that Broome's conjecture is more appealing than Ost's is; that our memory lapses represent the glittering remains of sideward steps into other worlds instead of simple neural failures.  But unfortunately, Ost's conclusion lines up better with the evidence.  Other studies, showing how easy it is to implant false memories, and how completely convincing those pseudomemories seem, indicate that what's really happening is that we are creating our recollections as we go, and some of them are simply invented from bits and pieces, from suggestions, or out of thin air.

The world, it seems, is far more solid than our memory of it.  So if Sri Lanka appears to have moved to the southeast, as some people apparently believe, then it's much more likely that you simply don't remember your geography very well than it is that you've had a glimpse of an alternate Earth in which the island is anchored elsewhere.