A random idea for a science fiction short story: a physicist discovers several different lines of evidence all pointing at the same conclusion: that matter should be constantly collapsing into vacuum- so often that universe shouldn’t exist for more than a few seconds. The only way the universe could possibly persist for longer would be if an unimaginably vast number of wave functions all happened to collapse in some exact pattern- impossibly unlikely even over the span of seconds, much less fourteen billion years.
Eventually, the physicist realizes that this mystery can only be resolved by the Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics. In fact, everything is constantly collapsing into vacuum, but the only branches of the universe we can experience are the ones where it’s just happened to survive by pure coincidence. This also implies that at any given moment, the next thing a person is overwhelmingly likely to experience is a flash of light and pain as the shockwave of a rapidly expanding bubble of collapsing matter rips apart the Earth, followed by oblivion.
Later on, the physicist receives a Nobel prize. At the award ceremony, he struggles to focus; in the years since his discovery, he’s been continually haunted by entirely warranted existential terror.
A random idea for a science fiction short story: a physicist discovers several different lines of evidence all pointing at the same conclusion: that matter should be constantly collapsing into vacuum- so often that universe shouldn’t exist for more than a few seconds. The only way the universe could possibly persist for longer would be if an unimaginably vast number of wave functions all happened to collapse in some exact pattern- impossibly unlikely even over the span of seconds, much less fourteen billion years.
Eventually, the physicist realizes that this mystery can only be resolved by the Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics. In fact, everything is constantly collapsing into vacuum, but the only branches of the universe we can experience are the ones where it’s just happened to survive by pure coincidence. This also implies that at any given moment, the next thing a person is overwhelmingly likely to experience is a flash of light and pain as the shockwave of a rapidly expanding bubble of collapsing matter rips apart the Earth, followed by oblivion.
Later on, the physicist receives a Nobel prize. At the award ceremony, he struggles to focus; in the years since his discovery, he’s been continually haunted by entirely warranted existential terror.