A copy of you is not reading this! ------------------------------------- Out there in the multiverse we all have dobbeltgaengers! Max Tegmarks May 2003 Scientific American article on Parallel Universes makes you wonder what relation you have to all these copies of you, out there in the mulitiverse. According to Tegmark, current cosmological models may indicate that space is infinite in size. If so, then somewhere out there, everything possible becomes real, no matter how improbable it is. Including an identical copy of the reader. What is left is only to calculate how far away your dobbeltgaenger is! How far away must you go before a given configuration of particles repeats (Hubble volume) ? Tegmarks estimate is 10 to 28th meters away. In another scenario our universe is just one bubble that emerged after the inflation period of the (complete) universe. In other bubbles the strength of the forces of nature might be different, the number of spatial and time dimensions might also be different. Lee Smolin suggested much the same in his book "The life of the Cosmos", here it was black holes that sprouted new universes with physical laws slightly mutated. Still, in some of these universe a copy of the reader is sitting there, identical, but not reading this. In both cases the copy of you is far away. Beyond observation. In the case of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics the copy is close by. Every conceivable way the world could be corresponds to a different universe. Different quantum branches of the multiverse. According to Multiverse theory, the parellel universes makes their presence felt in experiments like wave interference and quantum computation. Every possible state exist at any instant, so passage of time is the state of memory of one your dobbeltgaengers. In reality this brings nothing new compared to the first two scenarios for bringing about dobbeltgaengers. The only difference is that these dobbeltgaengers continously merge and branch from our universe, whereas the others are separated (?) for ever from us. Finally, any Platonist will tell you that the universe we see is but a reflection of some mathematical higher order. Some of these mathematics produces physics with selfaware beings in them. Some of them don't. Some universes produced as mathematic constructs will be nothing like the one we are in. Others are quite similiar - and our dobbeltgaengers are happy inside them. From our perspective inside one universe our dobbeltgaengers are distant entities. Still, the similiarity makes them close by from a "birds" view. The only question is really, how different can a dobbeltgaenger be - and still be "you"? -Simon Simon Laub www.silanian.subnet.dk