I saw a play called Constellations couple of evenings ago. It is a beautifully told love story between two people and all the possible situations that could have happened to them triggered by their first response to each other. The play deals with various forms of their relationship in parallel universes.

The actual quantum-mechanical hypothesis of parallel universes is “universes that are separated from each other by a single quantum event.”

Now, I was never a good student of physics but I must say that is probably because no one ever taught it with the wonder I now feel about it.

Out of the many best dialogues in the play the first one that struck out for me was , “In the quantum multiverse, every choice, every decision you’ve ever made and never made exists in an unimaginably vast ensemble of parallel universes.”

When I got down to paying attention to this the one part that fuelled my curiosity was the choices that I “never” made and how are they turning out in a parallel universe. Which lead me to think about the “what ifs” that cross our minds every now and then.

Now I don’t know if there is a parallel universe or no, but what I do know is that some of us suffer a great deal from hyper active imagination of the consequences from actions that we did not take. We can call it the “Could have” syndrome. If we had the option we would like to go back to some situations and would like to pick a different choice, even if it is out of curiosity. After all we all live the consequences of the choices we made, but it is not knowing what could have happened had we not followed our stronger instinct, had we not followed the right thing, had we not made the sensible choice…

The idea of parallel universe lets us imagine and indulge in fantasies of what might have happened and allows us to escape in a place of endless possibilities and scenarios. And when we indulge in fantasies we imagine a place where things might be better, more correct, happier, more free and above all different from the universe we know of as our current reality. The parallel universe in our imagination is our bolder choice, in our parallel universe we probably have more courage, less anxiety, more excitement less mundane. In our parallel universe things are going on just fine.

In our parallel universe life is idyllic, devoid of the choices we made that now pose as regrets in our current reality.

And the second dialogue was, “One of the basic laws of physics is that we don’t have a past and a present. Time is irrelevant at the level of atoms and molecules. It’s symmetrical. We have all the time we’ve always had.There’s not going to be any more or less of it.”

This dialogue was said in the context when she tells him that she is dying and he wishes they had more time.

When we think of our time with someone we love, and whether in moments of joy or loss it always feels too less. But to me the absolute Physics logic of the dialogue somewhere suggests the concept of destiny. When she tells him that, “we have all the time we have always had and there is not going to be any more or any less”, it simply says that is all the time we were meant to have. The time that it takes for the falling object from my hand to hit the floor is all the time that exists and once it hits the floor that journey is over. And who knows maybe in a parallel universe it is not, it is somewhere in the middle or about to start and may end very differently.

But irrespective of which universe we are in the fact is, that all that has a Beginning will have an End. It may or may not be to our liking but an End is inevitable. And if we remembered that, then perhaps we will be a little less miserable bunch. Now if we can get there with the help of Physics, then so be it. In the meantime there is a whole lot of in-between that needs our attention.