They seem to at the microscopic level. This is the basis for concepts like the Many Worlds Theory. But we don't expect this at large scale, less some very very long odds. When the chances of some highly unlikely, seemingly impossible quantum mechanical event are calculated, or estimated to the nearest order of magnitude, we generally find that the universe isn't nearly old enough to observe such an event. We don't expect our sense of reality to be violated at large scale. However, I have wondered if things are so fixed. I have experienced at least two minor events that were hardly noticeable, but seemed to be impossible nonetheless. Perhaps the most striking to me involved a cup of coffee. I had an unusually large coffee cup that I used for driving. But it didn't have a lid. I was picking up a friend and then attending a physics lecture. When we arrived at the lecture hall, I realized that my cup was still full. So I carefully placed it on the floor against the passenger seat. I then pointed it out to my friend so we would hopefully remember the cup and didn't spill it when we returned. After the lecture, we went back to the car and I drove him home. Not long before we arrived at his house I remembered the cup. Oh crap! The coffee. He said something similar in response and started checking the floor. He immediately found the cup laying on its side in front of him. Being a large cup, I had a bit of a mess to clean up... so I thought! We couldn't see anything until we got to his house. But after grabbing a towel, using a flashlight, we found that there wasn't a drop of coffee anywhere. All of the coffee in the cup had seemingly vanished without a trace. There was beyond a doubt a nearly full cup when I put it down. And there was beyond a doubt not a trace of spilled coffee anywhere. I considered that he was pulling a fast one. But I watched him get in as he was very tall had awkward getting in and out. I would have seen him doing it. It just wasn't possible for him to have done that and me not see it. On another occasion it was keys. I lost my keys. They were there. Then they weren't. Then, after looking everywhere, they were right where I thought I had left them in the first place. It was as plain as day. I was 100% certain they weren't there. Then they were. And I was alone. After talking with a few people over the years, I found that many other people have similar stories. For one, my mother. When I mentioned this one day, she suddenly recalled something from her early childhood. She was young but the event was so strange and so striking, even at the age of 10 or 12, that she never forgot it. I can't remember the details but it was like my own story. Something magically disappeared and then appeared again. If you look to sources like the old series Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World, you find stories such as witnesses to a plane crash, but no crash was found. Two women reported clearly seeing a WWII vintage plane crash into a field. So they drove to the nearest phone and called the police. But when they returned to the scene with emergency personnel, there was nothing there. A retired professor in Los Angeles claimed he was hiking in the hills when he came to a home. He talked with a woman in front of the home, who seemed strangely out of date, say by 100 years. And they house looked very old. She even invited him to the porch and they had some lemonade - it was a warm day. Later, he found that the land was all National Forest and no home could have been there. When he went back, there was nothing there. I have heard enough of these stories, in addition to my own paradoxical experiences, to make me wonder at times if alternate realities not only exist, but sometimes intersect our own reality. It's NOT a theory or anything like that. But I do have to wonder.
It's considered one of the ways we are being visited by other beings. If they do not have the technology to travel that far than a theory goes that they are actually coming from either another reality or parallel universe and it's simply a matter of opening the door. If you research this a bit you will find witness accounts of people seeing beings coming through what appears to be an opening and leaving the same way. What that could be is anyone's guess but it's certainly an option.
After my home world was destroyed by unwise high energy experiments at CERN, I took advantage of the cracks in space time to slip into this world, kill my alternate other, and replace him. I just fit right in and no one noticed. The only issue I had was that my alternate me had different passwords for my applications at work. Annoying!
Common mistake when world jumping and dealing with alternates. Always get the passwords before you take their spot. Keys also, lots of times they have changed the keys I've noticed. Nothing worse than going home and you can't open your door.
Quantum mechanics states that we can only know the state of a system at the time of the measurement, and immediately after. Then the system returns to a superposition of Eigenstates. Quantum Cosmologists argue that when I observe a gauge, it is not the wavefunction of the gauge that collapses, it is my wavefunction! This would mean that reality is subjective. But that is considered preferable [more logical] to each observer having to collapse the wavefunction of the entire universe. So it isn't out of the ball park to suggest that reality may not be constant. Perhaps it comes with fuzzy edges. It seems that if we assume some examples are true, it could be due to temporal anomalies. The man who was hiking distinctly described the house and woman he met as being "out of time". The two women who reportedly saw the plane go down, described what sounded like a WWII vintage plane. And that was a time when a plane might crash in England. I don't know if The Many World's Theory allows for such deviations. That would be the place to look for a hole in the math that allows for this. I've never heard it discussed either way.
I am reminded of a Twilight Zone episode from the second series, in 1985. It is called A Matter of Minutes. They actually address these minor mysteries as mistakes by the blue guys, who construct each moment in time. Sometimes the blue guys make mistakes! Edit: The media link seems to be broken.
Reality is an implication. It is what it is. It is not necessarily what it is inferred to be. Alternate inferences manifest, but alternate implications do not.
When you are having a bad day and strange stuff happens like grabbing yer beer and it falls out of yer hand, that's when someone from a parallel universe is screwing with you, damn pranksters..
Then again, The Simulation Hypothesis suggests the following: The odds that we live in a simulated universe are vastly greater than than the odds that we don't. So perhaps impossible anomalies are nothing more than glitches in our world software. The funny thing about that idea is this: I have read a paper, maybe a couple, arguing that the strange concepts from Quantum Mechanics make sense in a simulated universe. The basic idea being that the nature of peer-to-peer, digital communications, can be shown to be consistent with Quantum-Mechanical principles. The most obvious concept being the quanta. By definition, anything done digitally has defined smallest units, or quanta, also called bits, or pixels, depending on the context. Relativity treats spacetime as being smooth and continuous in normal space. This is fundamentally antithetical to the idea of a quantum universe. This is where simulation have problems. They have to compensate for errors introduced by digitizing the problem. It is also the great unification of physics that people have been seeking since Einstein - combining Relativity and Quantum Mechanics into one comprehensive theory.
Zohreh Davoudi, theoretical physicist at MIT, is designing an experiment to test for the fingerprint of a pixels in the structure of spacetime. I didn't quite get the entire concept...or I guess it's just been awhile since I watched this. But it has to do with problems with Energy and Momentum that physicists have when running complex simulations. Apparently there is a problem that produces a unique fingerprint in any digitized simulation. So she is going to look for this in [IIRC] cosmic rays. She explain it in this lecture. The woman seen in the freeze frame is Lisa Randall. Davoudi is the other woman on the panel.
I was watching the new series, In Search Of, and noted that there are people tracking alleged "shifts" in reality or time. This is one report. http://www.realityshifters.com/pages/yourstories.html Earlier I mentioned the example of a retired professor who was hiking in the hills outside of Los Angeles, an area he knew, when he claims he ran across a house and young woman, who seemed to be out of time; like something from the late 1800s. He claims he even sat and had some lemonade on her porch. He just thought it was strange until he later found that no such house exists. On the show In Search Of, he found that there seems to be a concentration of "time shift" reports in Liverpool, UK. Obviously the only evidence is purely anecdotal. But since I've had a couple of strange experiences myself, I can't help but wonder and be interested. Just shooting from the hip, I have to wonder, given the concept of the Many World's Theory, thus assuming that parallel universes or realities exist, perhaps they intersect for short periods of time due to a complex geometry. This might explain reports of other phenomena, such as ghost reports, people, ships, and planes that seemingly magically disappear, and many other reported, anomalous experiences,
In Quantum Electrodynamics, Feynman showed that the probability amplitude for a given path from S to P, is the sum the of the probabilities of all paths. In other words, we have to include all possible realities, to calculate the correct result. This suggests that alternate realities do manifest. We see their impact on the final measured values. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_electrodynamics#Propagators
It is far more likely that people forget or misinterpret things in this reality than that they experience something from another....that said, who knows.
And the missing socks. But the fact is, a significant percentage of the population claims one or more seemingly inexplicable experiences - from ghosts, to alien abductions, to religious experiences, to psychic experiences, to name a few. Obviously some claims are going to be failed memories, blind spots, ideomotor effect, hallucinations, etc. But in other cases this may not be possible - for example when there is more than one witness. I've had two seemingly inexplicable events with witnesses who verified the same events. Also, a man going on a daily hike isn't going to mistakenly remember a house with a woman sweeping the porch, and lemonade. We can guess that there is more to the story - like he had mental health issues, or fell and hit his head, or fell asleep and had a dream... But taken at face value, that doesn't seem likely. And it isn't more likely just because the alternative seems impossible. Anecdotal reports taken in isolation don't carry any logical weight. But when consistent patterns emerge from many disparate reports over a long period of time, then a root cause is logically implied. What strikes me is that there seems to be more anecdotal evidence for this sort of thing than I imagined.
We don't. That's the point. And it isn't inconsistent with schools of thought from mainstream physics. It's extreme but not suggested in isolation. And let's face it, if there really are alternate realities, we can only guess on how they might interact, if they do. And Quantum Electrodynamics implies that alternate realities do in fact determine what we call reality.
Im a Christian. I fully accept the possibility that God/spirit/afterlife are multidimensional aspects of our existence, as opposed to (floabt) magical ones. Possibly ones that we can master manipulation/control of with sufficient technological advancement. In fact, I tend to think this is Gods purpose for us- to one day greet Him as equals (we are made in His 'image', after all), having attained similar mastery over the universe through technological means, and build for ourselves the Utopia depicted in His Word. To be fair, I must credit the origin of this idea to an agnostic/atheist who frequented our high school Bible study, who proposed that 'God' could be a sufficiently technologically advanced being with access to time travel, life extension and massive processing capabilities. This could well be us given a long enough timeline.
The scientific version of a god is a higher-order civilization. https://futurism.com/the-kardashev-scale-type-i-ii-iii-iv-v-civilization We are a Type 0 approaching Type I status. To us, Type III beings or beyond might be considered gods. However, we also have the idea that the universe itself is a conscious entity. To me, this is consistent with biblical descriptions as well as evolving schools of thought related to consciousness. We also have the emerging paradigm that information is the building block of all reality, not subatomic particles. They in turn are just manifestations of information. So the notion of a cosmic consciousness that we can commune with through various forms of meditation, is a tempting thing to consider. The bible says we can move mountains with prayer. That might be translated to mean, we can control which alternate reality we experience.
The beauty of the bubble universe multiverse, is that it might explain the problem of the fine-tuned universe - why do the physical constants have just the right values needed, for atoms to form and us to exist? It may be that for every universe that works - where atoms or other forms of matter can exist - there are millions of failed universes. That would be consistent with the odds of us existing as we do. That or there is an underlying physics forcing those values, that we haven't yet discovered. Heim Theory reportedly predicted the values of the physical constants [we have to measure these values experimentally, no theory predicts their values], but it was argued that he inadvertently used circular logic to derive those values.
What are the little clocks? It turns out that for a free particle, the Feynman Propagator only depends on the time of travel for any path. The actual math behind this statement is seen below. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propagator Translation: For non-relativistic quantum mechanics. So it gets worse.
Anyone interested in learning about this subject from the man who invented it - Quantum Electrodynamics, Richard P Feynman - this is the definitive text. It is written for the casual reader but speaks to concepts at the highest level. Likewise, this is the definitive text for a casual understanding of Relativity