Ask A Genius 886: John Doe
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/04
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is John Doe, oakenbark@yahoo.com
“Dear Rick Rosner, I tried contacting Chris Langan, but he’s not easy to reach. I may have shifted this reality to something that I didn’t want. I need some help getting back towards the present moment. I’m not really sure how else to explain this except with the butterfly effect. I felt like I was a key component in all of this. Please contact me back.”
Rick Rosner: So, when somebody talks about shifting reality, they mean that they started in one multiverse timeline and somehow ended up in a different timeline, which I don’t find to be a supportable thing. As reality unfolds and time goes on, reality picks a path along every quantum event. It is a quantum choice, though choice implies intention. An open quantum, I don’t know what you’d call it, pre-event that an indeterminant quantum situation that becomes determinate is a choice among the various alternatives the probability space that the open, indeterminant quantum situation presented. So, in that way, the universe is tracing a new world line time-space path through events and time every time something quantum happens.
In that way, we choose among many worlds, but you can still shift back and forth among already determined multiple worlds. As long as the choices remain indeterminate, you can play games with that. Quantum Computing plays games with indeterminacy, but once quantum events become determined having occurred, you can’t jump to a different world line. In the most extreme form, the butterfly effect he was talking about initially starts with Ray Bradbury’s story in the 1950s, written in the 1950s and called The Sound of Thunder. In that story, a company offers safaris back into the past but strictly controlled, so you don’t fuck up the timeline; you don’t change anything. The story takes place right after the election, and the choice is between president, but the choice is between a good guy and an evil piece of shit like Trump. When the story was written, it was only conceivable in fiction to have a candidate who has a chance of winning, who’s as big a piece of shit as Trump turned out to be. Still, back then, that was when people were in the office just congratulating each other and expressing relief that the good guy, the non-fascist, the non-evil guy won the election.
Then, a group of guys take off on the safari, where you shoot a dinosaur who’s about to die anyway. So, when you shoot the dinosaur, you’re not changing time because you’re shooting a dinosaur that was already going to be dead almost simultaneously. They pull the bullet out of the dinosaur so they don’t leave that behind, so that can’t change anything, and everything’s fine except on this particular safari, one guy is a dick who ignores the rules. You’re not allowed to deter the path of the safari; they’ve determined a safe path that you can stay on without changing time. This dickhead wanders off the path and then the safari; they do their thing, and they think it’s no problem. They get back, and it’s a slightly different world in that the evil piece of shit has been elected president, and they’re like, what the fuck happened. Somebody looks at the dickhead’s shoe, and on the bottom of his boot is a butterfly that he stepped on when he stepped off the path somehow; killing that butterfly 65 million years ago changed the path of time, and the result was this evil fucker got elected president.
So, that’s where the butterfly effect, I believe, comes from, though it also comes from the idea that weather is so hard to predict that if a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, then three weeks later, you might get a typhoon in Indonesia, that little teeny things become magnified in unstable unpredictable systems to have unexpected and large results and this guy is either factious or misguided in thinking that has somehow thought his way into a world line that he wasn’t previously in.
Is that clear?
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: It would be great if we could somehow concentrate and think our way into a world in which Trump wasn’t elected in 2016, but I don’t think you can do that.
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