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By Root 1946 0

your sights and don’t seek an exact replica of our entire cosmic horizon, but would be satisfied with an exact copy of a region a few light-years in radius and centered on our sun, the order is more easily filled: on average, in every region that’s about 1010100 meters across, you should find one such copy. Still easier to find are approximate copies. After all, there is only one way to duplicate a region exactly, but many ways to almost duplicate it. Were you to visit these inexact copies, you’d find some that are barely distinguishable from ours, while in others the differences would range from obvious to exhilarating to shocking. Every decision you’ve ever made is tantamount to a particular particle arrangement. If you turned left, your particles went one way; if you turned right, your particles went the other. If you said yes, the particles in your brain, lips, and vocal cords proceeded through one pattern; if you said no, they proceeded through a different pattern. And so every possible action, every choice you’ve made and every option you’ve discarded, will be played out in one patch or another. In some, your worst fears about yourself, your family, and life on earth have been realized. In others, your wildest dreams have come to pass. In others still, the differences arising from the close but distinct particle arrangements have combined to yield an unrecognizable environment. And in most patches, the particle complexion would not include the highly specialized arrangements we recognize as living organisms, so the patches would be lifeless, or at least devoid of life as we know it.

Over time, the size of the cosmic patches laid out in Figure 2.1b will increase; with more time, light can travel farther and so each of the cosmic horizons will grow larger. Ultimately, the cosmic horizons will overlap. And when they do, the regions can no longer be considered as separate and isolated; the parallel universes will no longer be parallel—they will have merged. Nevertheless, the result we’ve found will continue to hold. Just lay out a new grid of cosmic patches with patch size set by the distance light can have traveled since the big bang through this later moment. The patches will be bigger, so to fill out a pattern like that in Figure 2.1b their centers will need to be farther apart, but with infinite space at our disposal, there’s ample room to accommodate this adjustment.16

And so we’ve come to a conclusion that’s both general and provocative. Reality in an infinite cosmos is not what most of us would expect. At any moment in time, the expanse of space contains an infinite number of separate realms—constituents of what I’ll call the Quilted Multiverse—with our observable universe, all we see in the vast night sky, being but one member. Canvassing this infinite collection of separate realms, we find that particle arrangements necessarily repeat infinitely many times. The reality that holds in any given universe, including ours, is thus replicated in an infinite number of other universes across the Quilted Multiverse.17

What to Make of This?

It’s possible that the conclusion we’ve reached strikes you as so outlandish that you’re inclined to turn the discussion on its head. You might argue that the bizarre nature of where we’ve gotten—infinite copies of you and everyone and everything—is evidence of the faulty nature of one or more of the assumptions that led us here.

Might the assumption that the entire cosmos is inhabited by particles be wrong? Perhaps beyond our cosmic horizon is a vast realm containing nothing but empty space. It’s possible, but the theoretical contortions required to accommodate such a picture render it thoroughly unconvincing. The most refined cosmological theories, to be encountered shortly, don’t lead us anywhere near this possibility.

Might the very laws of physics change beyond our cosmic horizon, corrupting our ability to perform any reliable theoretical analyses of those distant realms? Again, it’s possible. But as we will see in the next chapter, recent developments yield a compelling