A plea on behalf of Schrödinger's cat

I'm going to make a dual plea to all y'all:

1. Before you accept a paranormal or supernatural explanation for something, make sure you've ruled out all the normal and natural ones first.
2. Before you try to apply a scientific explanation to an alleged paranormal phenomenon, make sure you understand the science itself first.

I stumbled on an especially good (well, bad, actually) example of what happens when you break both of these rules of thumb with "paranormal explorer, investigator, and researcher" Ashley Knibb's piece, "Into the Multiverse to Search for Ghosts: Are We Seeing Parallel Realities?"  The entire article could have been replaced by the word "No," which would represent a substantial gain in both terseness and accuracy, but unfortunately Knibb seems to think that the multiverse model might actually explain a significant chunk of supernatural claims.

Let's start out with the fact that he joins countless others in misusing the word dimension to mean "some place other than the regular world we see around us."  To clear this up, allow me to quote the first line of the damn Wikipedia article on the topic: "the dimension of a mathematical space (or object) is defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any point within it."  We live in a three-dimensional space because three measurements -- up/down, right/left, forward/backward -- are necessary to pinpoint where exactly something is.

So saying that something is "in another dimension" makes about as much sense as saying your Uncle Fred lives in "horizontal."

Then he goes on to mention the quantum multiverse (also known as the Many-Worlds Interpretation), the bubble universe model, and brane theory as possible scientific bases for explaining the paranormal.  First off, I'll give him as much as to say that these are all legitimate theoretical models, although the three have little to nothing to do with each other.  The Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum theory arises because of the puzzle of the collapse of the wave function, which (in the Copenhagen Interpretation) seems strangely connected to the concept of an observer.  Physicist Hugh Everett postulated that observer-dependency could be eliminated if every quantum collapse results in a split -- every possible outcome of a quantum collapse is realized in some universe.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Christian Schirm, Schroedingers cat film, CC0 1.0]

Then there's the bubble universe model, which comes from the cosmological concept of inflation.  This theory suggests that our current universe was created by the extremely rapid expansion of a "bubble" of inflating spacetime, and that such bubbles could occur again and create new universes.  Finally, brane theory is an offshoot of string theory, where a brane is a higher-dimensional structure whose properties might be used to explain the apparent free parameters in the Standard Model of Particle Physics.

These three models do have one thing in common, though.  None of them has been supported by experimental evidence or observation (yet).  For the first two, it very much remains to be seen if they could be.  In Everett's Many-Worlds Interpretation, the different timelines are afterward completely and permanently sealed off from one another; we don't have access to the timeline in which a particular electron zigged instead of zagging, much less the one where you married your childhood sweetheart and lived happily ever after.  The theory, as far as it goes, appears to be completely untestable and unfalsifiable.  (This is what led to Wolfgang Pauli's brilliantly acerbic quip, "This isn't even wrong.")  

And as far as the bubble universe goes, any newly-formed bubbles would expand away from everything else at rates faster than the speed of light (it's believed that space itself isn't subject to the Universal Speed Limit -- thus keeping us science fiction aficionados in continuing hopes for the development of a warp drive).  Because information maximally travels at the speed of light, any knowledge of the bubble next door will be forever beyond our reach.

Be that as it may, Knibb blithely goes on to suggest that one of these models, or some combination, could be used to explain not only ghosts, but poltergeists, "audible phenomena," déjà vu, the Mandela Effect, sleep paralysis, and cryptid sightings.

Whoo-wee.  Sir, you are asking three speculative theories to do some awfully heavy lifting.

But now we get to the other piece, which is deciding that all of the listed phenomena are, in fact, paranormal in nature.  Ghosts and poltergeists -- well, like I've said many times before, I'm doubtful, but convincible.  However, I'm in agreement with C. S. Lewis's character MacPhee, who said, "If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I’ll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer."  A lot of "audible phenomena" can be explained by the phenomenon of priming -- when the mind is already anticipating a particular input (such as a creepy voice on a static-y recording) we're more likely to perceive it even if there's nothing there in actuality.  (As skeptic Crispian Jago put it, "You can't miss it when I tell you what's there.")  Déjà vu is still a bit of a mystery, but some research out of Colorado State University a few years ago suggests that it's also a brain phenomenon, in this case stemming from a misinterpretation of familiar sensory stimuli.  The Mandela Effect is almost certainly explained by the plasticity of human memory.  Sleep paralysis is a thoroughly studied, and reasonably well understood, neurological phenomenon (although apparently scary as hell).

As far as cryptid sightings -- well, y'all undoubtedly know what I think of most of those.

So the first step with all of these is to establish that there's anything there to explain.  The second is to demonstrate that the scientific explanations we do have are inadequate to explain them.

The third is to learn some fucking science before you try to apply quantum physics, inflationary cosmology, and string theory to why you got creeped out in a haunted pub.

Okay, I'm probably coming across as being unwarrantedly snarky, here.  But really.  There's no excuse for this kind of thing.  Even if you're not up to reading peer-reviewed science papers on the topics, a cursory glance at the relevant Wikipedia pages should be enough to convince you that (for example) the bubble universe model cannot explain ghosts.  Misrepresenting the science in this way isn't doing anyone any favors, most especially the people who seriously investigate claims of the supernatural, such as the generally excellent Society for Psychical Research.

As far as whether there's anything to any of these allegedly paranormal claims -- well, I'm not prepared to answer that categorically.  All I can say is that of the ones I've looked into, none of them meet the minimum standard of evidence that it would take to convince someone whose mind isn't already made up.  But I'm happy to hear about it if you think you've got a case that could change my mind.

Just make sure to tell the ghost not to get shy if I hold up a camera or a thermometer.

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Glitch report

A loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a YouTube link with the message, "Okay, so what do you make of this?"

It turned out to be a video from a channel called The Mysteria Archive titled, "The Reality Glitch: People Are Waking Up in the Wrong Timeline."  In it, we hear about folks who had the sudden sense -- often just after waking -- that everything was subtly changed.  Nothing quite looks or feels right.  Sometimes it's just an intangible feeling; other times minor details, like the color of a piece of furniture, the title of a book on the shelf, the brand of coffee you'd purchased, are different from what you remember.

In some cases, though, it's not minor.  In a story that got enough traction that (according to the video) it ended up in Newsweek in July of 2023, a woman decided to return after many years to take a look at her childhood home in northern New Jersey.  When she arrived -- although she recognized the street and the rest of the neighborhood -- the house at the address was completely different from the home she'd grown up in.  Neighbors insisted the house had been there for years, and that there'd never been the two-story colonial-style home there that she remembered; additionally, none of them knew of a family with her last name that had ever lived in the neighborhood.  Shaken, she returned home, and after some online research confirmed that the unfamiliar house now standing at her childhood address had been there for decades.

In another strange account, this one that ended up in Medium, an Australian woman named Elsie Harven was detoured by construction on her way to work in Sydney, and passed an office building with a sign saying "Bellridge Solutions."  She distinctly recalled having worked there as an intern when she was in college -- but when she checked her résumé later, she could find no mention of it.  Friends who knew her at the time had no memory of her having worked there, either.  Understandably freaked out, she decided to return to the building the following week to see if they had record of her -- only to find that the sign saying "Bellridge Solutions" was gone, and the building she'd seen was now completely empty.

Very weird.  Kind of a more personalized version of the Mandela Effect, is how I think of it.

So the narrator then goes into the possibility of it being a side-slip into another timeline -- the old "rip in the spacetime continuum" thing that was the genesis of at least two dozen plot twists in Star Trek alone.  He does admit that human memory is remarkably plastic, but seems convinced that this isn't enough to explain all the hundreds of such accounts there are out there.  The most likely explanation, he says, is that there was a glitch in the Matrix -- the software running the simulation we're all in has developed minor inconsistencies that every once in a while become apparent to someone.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons courtesy of creator Jamie Zawinski]

I have to admit that I've had similar experiences myself.  Nothing so dramatic as finding a different house at my childhood address or having an entire office building more or less erased, of course.  More like feeling things are surreal, like what I'm looking at "isn't quite right."  Not better or worse; just different, as if someone had subtly altered everything while I wasn't looking.  I tried to capture the feeling of this experience in my novel The Accidental Magician:

After hanging up, Carla sat looking out of the sliding glass door into her sheltered back yard, the shadows lengthening as twilight approached.  It all looked so normal.

But things felt off.  It was like those drawings she’d seen in kids’ magazines growing up, the ones labeled, Find twelve things wrong with this picture!  On a glance, everything is as it should be—a brother and a sister in a traditional-looking kitchen, a mom bringing them plates with sandwiches.  But then you looked closer, and the numbers on the clock dial are backwards, the mom is wearing swim fins, the milk-filled glasses on the table are upside down, the cat sitting in the corner is reading a book.

Even as a child, Carla felt a vague sense of unease about those, although they were only drawings.  The problem was that the people in them always seemed completely unaware of the fact that the world around them had gone mad.  Or maybe—they knew.  They knew, and wanted it that way.  The mom wore a reassuring smile, as if to say, No, dear, of course this is normal!  Don’t you know that?  Everything’s fine.  Just eat your sandwich and stop worrying.

So I won't deny the sensation is disorienting and unpleasant.  But what, exactly, is going on here?

I suppose it's unsurprising that I'm inclined to discount the "slipped into a different timeline" response.  This refers, of course, to the famous "Many-Worlds Interpretation" of quantum physics, which attempts to explain the baffling "collapse of the wave function" phenomenon -- the fact that a particle is in a superposition of probabilities until it's observed -- by positing that every possible outcome for the collapse happens, only in different timelines.  The thing is, though, those timelines afterward become completely isolated from one another; Geordi LaForge notwithstanding, it doesn't appear to be possible to jump into a different timeline (more's the pity for most of us here in the United States, who seem to have had our wave function collapsed into the stupidest, cruelest, and greediest timeline imaginable).

The other explanation he offers is the computer simulation one, and to me that's at least marginally more plausible.  Some of these occurrences do have the feel of an elaborate computer game glitching.  But "it feels similar" is light years away from any kind of rigorous scientific explanation.

The most parsimonious explanation is that it's a brain phenomenon.  Most of us remember the past poorly and incompletely, while simultaneously believing that our memories are one hundred percent reliable (and therefore, that anyone who remembers differently is just plain wrong).  I have to admit that remembering your childhood address -- and the rest of the neighborhood -- and having a different house show up there is a pretty major glitch, but it seems like there should be some way to cross-check more deeply than the woman in New Jersey did.  Surely she had to have some record of her address, photographs of her home, school records, something.

Isn't it easier to believe she'd done something like transposed two digits in the address than the entirety of reality being a glitchy computer simulation?

Now, mind you, this isn't a rigorous proof either.  I'm not saying the simulation explanation is impossible, just that the evidence we have doesn't get anywhere near the standard required by science.  At the moment, it's a weird, surreal phenomenon that happens to people sometimes, and that's kind of where we have to leave it.

On the other hand, if we are in a computer simulation, can we have something positive come out of it?  No Agent Smith or evil tracking devices being inserted into Keanu Reeves's navel, nothing like that.  But a targeted lightning strike on a golf course near Mar-a-Lago?

I'd happily reconsider my stance.

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