Quantum History

A lesson I am learning from contemporary physics and astronomy is: instead of looking at the history of the universe as a series of events that led to us, we should look at it the other way round. Because we are here, the universe has the history that it does. Semantics? Not quite. Our “normal” way of looking at history is: “A caused B to happen, which caused C to happen, etc, etc.”  Another way to look at history is to say that because current events exist the way that they do, then history must have followed a series of events that led to their existence.

Try it again: while it may be true that in the 15^th century the illegitimate son of a street vender murdered a young woman who had been “destined” to be the mother of a hero who conquered the world, the fact that this “conquering” did not occur means that this hither-to unknown murder was only one possible explanation for what followed. There is no way we can verify that this specific event caused the non-outcome, or that some other seemingly unrelated event was the “cause.” This is a problem with destiny. What is destined is what actually occurred, not what might have occurred. It is like trying to prove a negative. So, no world conqueror means there is no cause for no world conqueror, unless one wants to admit an infinite number of alternative theories.

Another example is the old science fiction conundrum: what if I went back in a time machine and murdered my grandfather?  What would happen? I submit that nothing would happen. You are here now, so that means that you did not go back in a time machine and kill your grandfather. If you had succeeded in that event, then you would not be here and your grandfather would not have been murdered by you. When you start multiplying negative numbers you have to be careful of which side of zero you are on.

And that’s essentially how quantum physics works. A photon moving from point A to point B has an infinite number of possible paths that it could have followed to get there. There are only degrees of probability as to which path was actually followed; in other words: some choices are more likely than others—but that does not completely eliminate all other possibilities. The fact that we are here in the universe at this time means that an infinite number of other possibilities, some more likely than others, did not happen in our universe. We are here; therefore when the universe was 200 seconds old exactly the right proportions of hydrogen, helium, and lithium atoms existed to enable our later existence. If there were not the right proportions of those three primary elements at the right time in the history of our universe then we would not be here to talk about it. We were not caused by the right combination at the right time because there are an almost infinite number of alternative histories that could have been followed after that critical moment. Only one path leads to us; all other paths lead to “not-us.”

The conclusion is that because we are here, our universe has the history that it does. Without us, it has an infinite number of alternative histories, separated only by degrees of probability.

This is actually a radical shift in thinking about history. The history of anything, I might add. Our brains are hardwired to see causes and consequences. That is the basis of the science and philosophy of the past 2500 years. We see something. What caused it? What effect did it have? In this way of thinking, we need a primary cause, because events can not be caused by nothing. So, we invent a god or a “prime mover” to fill in the logical hole. But, if history is a series of probabilities, then we do not need a primary event to get things going. We just have to ask: what are the probabilities that something exists rather than not-exists? Given an infinite number of possibilities, then eventually, no matter how small the probability, something will exist.

Look at it this way: if something can happen, then it will happen (or has happened). Our universe is just one of an infinite number of other probable universes.