Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives

Last night I attended a movie/lecture at the Museum of Science here in Boston. Though it wasn't quite what I thought it would be I was very happy that I went. I was fun and interesting and I learn quite a lot. Read the event details below and continue on to my commentary afterwards: The Museum of Science

Event Details
Have you ever wondered what your life would be like if you did something or didn’t do something? Well, somewhere in another dimension, you did make that choice and you are living that life.

Come to the Museum of Science for a sneak preview of the film Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives which is all about Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) theory. Basically, the theory means that there is a very large, perhaps infinite, number of universes and that everything that could possibly happen in our universe (but doesn't) does happen in some other universes. MWI reconciles how we can perceive non-deterministic events with the deterministic equations of quantum physics. Prior to many worlds, this had been viewed as a single "world-line". Many-worlds rather views it as a many-branched tree where every possible branch of history is realized.

The film Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives follows Mark Oliver Everett, lead singer of the cult band the Eels, on his quest to learn about his father, Hugh Everett III, a physicist who gave birth to this bizarre and influential theory. At first derided, Hugh Everett's theory has steadily gained traction among physicists while Mark Everett has increasingly grown curious about his emotionally distant father. In this intelligent and imaginative film, the wry and charismatic Mark embarks on a journey back into his father's life, meeting his old friends and colleagues, and takes a crash course in the weird world of quantum mechanics in order to understand his father's mind-blowing theory.

Join physicist Max Tegmark and Nova Senior Executive Producer Paula Apsell for a sneak preview of the film, which airs on PBS's Nova on October 21 at 8:00 p.m.

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First off, the film is funny and I recommend you watch it on the 21st. Mark is a funny quirky guy and his quest to understand his father is touching. While watching it, I did not feel bored at all even though we were being fed theories about Quantum Physics.

Max (mentioned above) was very good at explaining things to us in a way we could understand. The idea of thousands of alternate universes where we exist is somewhat far fetched for most of us to grasp. His reasoning was this:

Think about how baseball players can gauge where the arch of a ball is going to end so they can catch it and make the out-but this wasn't always the case. At one point, our ancestors couldn't do this and that guy got killed because he got hit in the head with a rock. Eventually we developed it or thought about what would happen if we put our hands up to block it. And then it went to what if we try to catch it? At some point, everything we think is "normal" now was once a radical idea. That's the only way we discover things-is to accept that things are bigger than they are now, and try to make sense of them.

I thought it was very well put. It brought things into perspective and though I still have trouble thinking that I am split into millions of other universes, I can accept that alternate universes MAY exist.

Can I just tell you how happy I am that I moved here? Never in my life would I have imagined that I would attend a movie/lecture about quantum physics with a bunch of fun people and actually LIKE it. This city offers so many fun and interesting things for so many different types of people, it's just so wonderful. I don't know why anyone would want to live in another city!