Multiverses aren’t just limited to bad writing (need to recycle characters? undo a narrative mistake? think your audience is too dumb to understand duality in a single construct? parallel universe to the rescue!), they also pop up in bad cosmology. Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising as so much cosmology (like 16th century medicine) is just storytelling. There’s precious little observation to back any of it up. So, if your clever bit of maths only resolves general relativity and quantum mechanics if there’s a multiverse, then well, OBVIOUSLY, there’s a multiverse. Does your argument hinge on the impossible, or the spectacularly unlikely? No worries. The multiverse will bail you out every time. I mean if there’s enough universes, there’s one where all theories, no matter how bad, win someone a nobel prize, right?
But logic and our own observations tell us that this multiverse is just so much pholigston or phrenology.
How would it work? Either they’re forking all the time (every time something happens anywhere), or they were all there at the beginning and having been running in some unthinkably massive parallelism.
The forking doesn’t work because it requires a transfer of information (everything exactly the same, except Bad Kirk, Bad Kirk with that french detective mustache, Bad Kirk with hair that particular shade of reddish blonde you find in…) and thus a loss of energy. Plus it requires an energy transfer to the ‘outside’ (feel free to invent your fake balancing mechanism and use it to prop up your crazier theory – what’s that sound? just poor William of Ockham turning in his grave.). It also requires an infinite amount of energy in the universe (or we would have blinked out long ago) and an infinite amount outside (to create all those multiverses for every possible path of every possible thing). And there’s absolutely zero evidence for infinity. Anywhere except our minds, amongst the turtles holding up the earth, the unstoppable forces, the zeno’s paradoxes…
There’s also that pool of energy outside our universe, but related to it such that it’s ready to snap into being (with the appropriate past, present, and future) for every future possibility
Not only is there enough time for the monkeys and the Shakespeare, there’s enough stuff to support parallel universes, just like ours, except I’m a bad guy there.
But is it real? Are there all these universes bubbling off at every possible decision tree or possibility fork for every bit of energy in the entire universe.
No. That’s ridiculous. And sad.
First, there can’t be any forking.
the it assumes that some how the instructions are something distinct from the stuff and they can be transferred. Like if you want to have another universe where, I don’t know, everything is exactly the same except that 7th season of Game of Thrones never happened, or was written by actual writers or whatever… there’s a lot of intricate copying to do. Did it spring into existence at some fork, or was it always there, just like every possible position of every possible thing in the whole universe is stored in every possible configuration. Well, there’s no such thing as infinity and even if there was, which there isn’t, our universe doesn’t work that way. There appear to be rules. It’s not a free for all.
And back to the instructions. There aren’t any. A loaf of bread is not a loaf of bread plus some file that contains instructions for how the proteins and sugars and starches interact in the presence of heat and acid and whatever. There’s just the bread. All the stuff adheres to localized or general rules. If you repeat the process similarly you get similar results. But not because the bread knows how to become bread. It just does if certain things are combined in certain ways.
So you can fork the monoverse. the universe is just some amount of energy (some in the form of mass which is just a variation of energy) in some shape with some ways things interact. There’s nothing to copy. And there’s nothing to build a copy with.
Perhaps at the beginning, there was enough energy to create many, many whole universes with very slightly different ways things would interact or some very subtly different ground state such that there are all these other universes that are almost exact except… Bad Kirk. It’s hard to disprove because those are outside the observable universe. Seems less apt to be true, though. That’s a lot of energy required to wind up with Good Kirk and Bad Kirk and a universe where Bad Kirk wins and whatever. I guess if there’s an infinite amount of energy you can believe anything you want, no matter how irrational. But OUR universe has a finite amount of energy. Not enough monkeys or enough time to get a perfect Bad Kirk. Maybe there’s someplace in the universe where there’s like a Troubled Kirk with a few bad tendencies and like an arm sticking out his forehead…
At any rate, and ergo, if the universe isn’t forking and any parallel Bad Gyllenhaal universe had to be there at the beginning, then THAT requires an entirely deterministic universe. You can get to Bad Gyllenhaal by just ever slightly changing the recipe however long ago (NOT 13.8 billion years…).