You Are Not a Clone

The notion that there are multiple copies of you in parallel universes is mythological, two physicists argue.

PhysOrg announced, “You don’t exist in an infinite number of places, say scientists.”

If you’ve read about how modern cosmology may imply that, in an infinite universe, the existence of planets and the life forms that live on them must be repeated an infinite number of times, you may have been just a little bit skeptical. So are a couple scientists from Spain, who have posted a paper at arXiv.org criticizing the concept of the infinite repetition of histories in space, an idea closely related to the concepts of “alternate histories,” “parallel universes,” and the “many worlds interpretation,” among others.

Francisco José Soler Gil at the University of Sevilla and Manuel Alfonseca at the Autonomous University of Madrid examined these proposals logically and in terms of quantum physics and found them wanting.  First of all, they lead to infinities in the math, which is something cosmologists should try to avoid.  Second, they are speculations based on assumptions, not hard science.

Soler Gil and Alfonseca criticize almost all of the assumptions in this proposal, starting with the application of quantum theory to cosmology, which is currently mere conjecture without evidence…

But the scientists’ biggest criticism of the idea of infinite repetition in both proposals is the assumption that the universe is infinite. Whether the universe is infinite or finite is a big open-ended question in cosmology that scientists may never answer….

While Soler Gil and Alfonseca can’t disprove the proposals of infinite repetition, they emphasize that the point of their critique is to show that the idea remains in the realm of philosophy, mythology, and sci-fi tales, not modern cosmology.