From: Don Winterstein (dfwinterstein@msn.com)
Date: Sun Jul 06 2003 - 03:49:43 EDT
I wonder if someone here more familiar than I with cosmology literature can say what it means for a universe to be identical to another universe.
I've never been terribly interested in this subject, because dealing with parallel universes seems to be no more than a sophisticated intellectual game. In particular, Tegmark's "Level III multiverse," from the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, seems justified only as an effort to preserve elegance in QM theory while making the real world grossly inelegant. A better version of QM theory seems much more likely to be the long-term solution than infinities of universes. I'll take an elegant world over an elegant theory any day, if I have to choose between the two.
But Tegmark talks about identical universes in the Level I multiverse, where universes are in every respect like our own except at great distances from us. We know from QM that no two such universes can be strictly identical for more than, say, a picosecond at a time, because wave functions are not going to collapse in identical ways in both universes. Divergence would only grow with time. But cosmologists must be well aware of this. So what do they mean by identical universes? Is the concept even defined?
The answer should have something to do with whether an exact copy of me can exist elsewhere, as Tegmark so blithely assumes.
A theological impact would concern the nature of Christ. I know that I wouldn't be the same person as my postulated "doppelganger," but Christ presumably would be the same person in both universes.
But such a theological question would arise in a far less far-out scenario than one involving an identical parallel universe: It would become an issue if and when God ever implemented a plan of salvation for souls living on other planets within our own universe. This is much more likely to become a real issue than any parallel universe scenario, and it would raise really interesting questions, such as what sort of body Christ would have on the other planet, what it would mean for him to die again--or whether salvation won on Earth would be effective there, and whether there might ultimately be more than one "heaven."
Don
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