150: Backwash

It’s been theorised that when a decision is made, at the quantum level, the universe splits in two. Or, more accurately, that whenever a quantum event has multiple possible outcomes, all outcomes are realised, each in its own distinct universe. And that therefore all possible alternative histories and futures are real. But there are always to be found residues of the other in the one. These can be seen as tiny build ups of matter in the crease of the point of decision; a molecular accumulation, a kind of quantum backwash, wherein dead matter from the ghost branch decomposes, compresses and carbonises in the divide. This matter may then appear as a slim deposit of charcoal in a crack in the wall or the floor where a quantum choice was taken, an option settled, a route coerced. When retrieved from this crevice and manipulated by a skilled hand, certain details from the foreclosed world may be uncovered. For example the charcoal may be placed in the hand of a child, preferably preverbal, and outlines of the other world will soon find themselves sketched out on the page placed before them. Or, under microscopic observation, a microbiologist may find new species of bacteria, viruses, or even new proteins: hitherto unrecorded sequences of amino acids. All to be unlocked or uncovered in the deposit that slips back or washes back down the spectral branch to the point of bifurcation. But, despite this physical evidence, the quantum forking of worlds does not ‘bubble up’ to the macro level. This would mean that every thing, every element, every atom, along with every subatomic particle, and through that every planet, every star and every galaxy in the universe would get simultaneously duplicated such that whenever someone here on Earth decides to, say, cross the road just before the bend, or have another glass of sherry, or push someone from the bridge onto the rail track, a quark 500 billion light years away gets unceremoniously split in two, with no rhyme or reason. No. The splitting occurs on a more spacio-temporally localised basis: if you are a Boson, you may experience the bifurcation; if you are a bison, you may not. The ripples from the fracture fanning out for only as far and wide as the intensity of the break prescribes. It’s also been pointed out that this agentic perspective does not account for the aleatory nature of the universe and that the general total confluence of matter and energy is also subject to infinitesimally small and unimaginably frequent moments of other-worlding. And this is only possibly explainable through the “single electron” hypothesis: that the entire quantum fabric of the universe is woven by a single electron moving simultaneously forwards and backwards through time, at 500 billion times the speed of light. This will be discovered via the observation of the “hungry positrons'' embedded in the quantum charcoal: as no pigment or chromo-carbonic substance will ever be detected in the material, it will be theorised (quite correctly, it will turn out) that the absolute blacks achieved through the application of the substance are explained by the nano-structural behaviour of the electrons and positrons, whose mutual divergences pulse in an temporal-exponential geometry that traps and trans-substantiates photons, thereby absorbing light across both visible and non-visible spectra. So, this sketch of the Byawoviezha Forest you see before you, with its spruce, beech and ash sheltering the herds of wisent, is not just a representation of an ancient woodland. Through these stark black strokes, it forms a direct manifestation of the complex interplay of physics at the most fundamental of levels: The dense canopy of the quantum realm; that tapestry of molecular interactions, driven by the ceaseless motion of the single electron, boring its subatomic wormholes through the fabric of the universe, in order to be, and to have already been, simultaneously everything everywhere forever.