Ode to the Many-Worlds Interpretation

Lyrics

Palmer Physical, Room 202.
The chalk dust hangs in the radiator heat.
November, 1956.
The measurement problem.
The observer who breaks the world just by looking.
A ghost in the machine.
You were twenty-six.
You stood up in Wheeler's seminar.
And you asked the question nobody wanted to answer.
What if the math is telling the truth?
What if the superposition isn't a trick of probability?
What if the universe doesn't choose?
It just... includes.
No collapse.
Just a clean, quiet split.
The universal wave function keeps on writing.
From the standpoint of the theory,
all branches are actual.
None any more real than the rest.
The world where I say this,
and the world where I don't.
So there's a you who never wrote it down.
A you whose thesis John Wheeler accepted on the spot.
A me who heard this song on the radio in a different car, on a different road.
Every decision, every spin of a particle,
birthing a universe.
A terrible, lonely, perfect abundance.
An infinity of us, and we never meet.
No collapse.
Just a clean, quiet split.
The universal wave function keeps on writing.
From the standpoint of the theory,
all branches are actual.
None any more real than the rest.
The world where you lived,
and the world where you didn't.
You put the blue-bound copy on the shelf.
You went to work for the Institute for Defense Analyses.
Mapping nuclear outcomes.
The man who saved every world on paper,
paid to calculate the end of one.
Bryce DeWitt found your paper a decade later.
He gave it a name. He saw what you saw.
July 19, 1982.
You were fifty-one.
No ceremony.
Just the household trash.
Ashes scattered across a thousand timelines.
Dispersed.
Actual.
Real.