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In a range of scientific disciplines, branchiness has become a dominant theme in explaininghow the world works. Most quantum physicists accept some version of Hugh Everett III's

idea that in the absence of any mechanism of choice, every time a quantum event occurs in

which there are equal probabilities of different outcomes, each of those outcomes does indeed

happen, initiating at the branchpoint a new parallel universe, a new timeline. Since quantum

events are happening all the time everywhere, this would produce a rather unruly foliage of

temporal dendrification--but there are pruning shears available in nature, which we will look

at in a moment.

Branchiness is a key concept in many other fields. Evolutionary theory concerns itself with

the branched lineages of life. Anthropological studies of kinship and descent, scholarly

establishment of influence, provenance, or text, electrochemical investigations of alternatemolecular pathways, all accept a branchy view of the world. Computer science is all about

branches--a transistor is a controllable branchpoint. Logic itself is the study of branchpoints

such as ands, ors, ifs, boths, and alls.

The branchiness of things as we now conceive them stands in marked contrast to the iron rails

of unique linear deterministic cause and effect as conceptualized by the eighteenth,

nineteenth, and much of the twentieth centuries. There is not one line of necessity. The

universe is now increasingly coming to be seen as an open system, with freedom as a

constitutive principle. Though we can still see the causes by which some situation came to

exist, we are also aware of other plausible outcomes, and we know that some situations are

hugely and irreducibly unpredictable, and that all events are unpredictable at some minute

level of exactness. Humans are no longer seen as unique in being free--everything is, more or

less; our uniqueness is now that we recognize and can to some extent control that freedom--

even, as we bind ourselves with promises, freely corral our own freedom and prune our

possible futures.

As we have already noted, quantum theory makes the observer a player in reality, and

observation always takes place after the fact. Thus the future of an event can help determine

that event, so that now a weak "backward-in-time" influence is added to the strong "forward-

in-time" constraints of causality, thus closing a feedback loop and rendering time nonlinear or

looped. We are now observing the big bang in the form of radiation that set out thirteenbillion years ago, and thus in some very minute way we are helping determine how the big

bang happened.

The physicist John Archibald Wheeler has argued that since events require observers to

transform them from mere probabilities into actual realities, the only real big bang that could

occur would be one which would later bring about observers of it. This is not as radical an

idea as its initial formulation as the Anthropic Principle would suggest; even atoms are

reasonable candidates for being observers in the physical sense, and harmonics among

quantum waves can bring about a similar collapse from distributed probability to coherent

near-certainty. Nevertheless, how something is observed affects its nature, as well as simply

that it is observed; and humans can observe in a variety of new ways, asking new questions of

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the universe to which the universe--including its own past--must suddenly come up with an

answer, never having had the need to "make up its mind" on the issue before.

The more exciting implication of this nonlinearity of time is that observing beings in our own

future, or futures, must one day be observing us, and thus rendering what is indeterminate

about us definite and real. If we are faintly aware of this process going on, that awarenesswould nicely correspond to such claims as prophetic inspiration, conversations with angels or

spirits, the voice of conscience, near-death experiences, divination, deja vu and other

phenomena.

If we combine the ideas of branchiness and loopedness, an extremely interesting possibility

emerges.

Though physicists accept the parallel universes theory, they do so grudgingly; there is

something deeply cumbersome about all that foliage of timelines, and the problem remains of

where they all are--why can't we see them? The only space for them is, after all, space--the

same space that we occupy. Why doesn't their combined near-infinite mass crush ouruniverse in an instant? If they are separate from us in space, how did they get there? If a

whole new universe branches off from some quantum event in my fingernail, where does the

energy come from to transport it trillions of light years away so that it doesn't get in the way

of this one? The universe does contain a lot of "dark matter" that we can only detect by the

influence of its mass, but it is only a small multiple of the ordinary matter we know and love;

there is room in that mass for some alternative futures of past events, but not many. Again,

the universe does have a quantum fuzziness at small scales, such that quantum superposition

and nonlocality can flourish; we can interpret that fuzz as the penumbra of parallel universes

hovering around this one; but at larger scales that fuzziness is damped out.