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Infinite Universes

How many times?

How many times do I have to see, read, or hear this drivel?

"Every time you make a choice, you create an alternative future!"

Again, and again, and again, and again, idiotic writers (usually the kind that likes to refer to themselves as "dreamers") prattle off stories (pun intended) where there are infinite universes, each created when some human makes some arbitrary decision (because humans are sooooooo important!)

This forks the future, see?  It makes both decisions happen, but in different universes.

A whole new universe is created, whenever an incredibly-important-bog-standard-mammal of a human makes a choice.

Is it bollocks.

Let's try something.

I want you to light a fire – in an appropriate place, of course; e.g. a place called a "fireplace" sounds reasonably appropriate.

That done, spend the next three or four minutes inventing a device that will sit above the fire, and absorb all its energy (I have faith that you can do it; you wouldn't be here if you were stoopid).

Then all you have to do is maintain that fire, for a while – keep it burning, day and night.

For, say, fifty years.

OK, when you've done that, take all that energy, and compress it, form it, structure it into matter (um, you do know that elementary particles are just bubbles of compressed, structured energy, right?  That's why they make such a mess, when you break them).  You've had fifty years to invent and build a device to do it, so I'm sure it will work just fine.

With any luck – actually, with a lot of luck – your clever absorbing-energy-from-a-fire device will have sucked up enough energy to make one or two whole protons!

What a great result!

Given a few hundred-thousand-billion-squintillian-gozillion years, you could fabricate enough particles to make a Malibu Stacy!

(But she'd have to wait a long time for something other than a bikini to wear.)

According to the "dreamers", though, all you'd have to do is decide not to light up a cigarette, and you'd create An Entire F&ˆ%$£* Universe of Matter, where the "you" of that universe gets lung cancer and plots to swap lives with you.

Yeah.

Do you know how many particles there are in the universe?

The latest estimates range from 1080 to 1085.  Hell of a range, eh?  And bear in mind that those are only guesses, so they're wrong.

And, with all your genius, you could only manage two particles per fifty years (don't take it too hard, though; that's more than anyone else has ever managed).

So give us a break, "dreamers".

Stop spouting bollocks, and say something that's worth listening to.


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