ALL NOVEL In Which The Multiverse Is Explained In A Dissatisfying Way
Early proponents of multiverse theory believed there would be an infinite number of universes, with each universe splitting every time something occurred whether by chance or by choice. For instance, if a coin was flipped the timeline would split and two universes would be created, one in which the coin had landed heads and one in which the coin landed tails.
If this were the case, an organisation like the Bureau for Space Time management could never have been formed: besides the logistics of governing an increasingly large infinity of universes, every time a chance event or decision was made within the Bureau the Sequential-Chronological timeline itself would split. This would lead to an infinitely increasing number of Bureaus to coordinate with too- and then those coordinations would lead to more splits, and so on to insanity.
And truth be told, it showed a certain hubris on the part of early civilisations that they believed the decision of whether or not to add sweetener to one’s morning caffeinated beverage was enough to create an entirely new universe. It also showed ignorance, as many things which were ascribed to chance - and, at least colloquially, still are - are simply the result of incomplete information. From the moment the movement occurs the fate of a coin flip is determined. A well trained physical mathematician would be able to calculate weight, angle, force, friction, gravitational pull and a dozen other variables to determine which face the coin would land on- provided they hadall the information. A dozen coin flips occurring under identical situations with identical coins would yield identical results.
A system does not need to be understood or mapped by its inhabitants to work: it simply does. Because of this, though historical researchers of many races alluded to chaos theory, and the inability to predict outcomes of extremely large, complex systems due to minutiae of variables, the point remains: as soon as the coin is flipped, it will land in a certain way. If allowed to hold a coin beforehand, a Rhyzzian would always be able to tell the result of a flip.
Once realised, this created enormous debate on the existence, or possible lack thereof, of free will. Similarly to the differences in the chronological and sequential time streams, and the fact that much of what has yet to happen sequentially already has happened chronologically, the fact that most scenarios only give the illusion of chance rather than there being any real chance in the matter alarmed a large number of philosophers, thinkers, and watchers of daytime talk shows.
Because if one was always going to choose the banana milkshake instead of the raspberry one, then was it really a choice at all?
Of the races able to grasp this debate, the argument was torn three ways. There were those that argued, yes, of course it was still a free choice, it was just a much more obvious choice than you realised- if you offered your young offspring a really delicious meal and an awful meal, no one would say their choice of the delicious one was not free choice. It appeared, at a metaphysical level, that all choices were so obvious.
Those that argued no tended to use the fact that the results of the choice had often already been experienced, sometimes millions or billions before in the chronological time stream; in which case, an individual was never able to make a different choice, and they merely had the illusion of free choice. The deterministic nature of coin tosses aligned with the fact that the outcomes likely had already been experienced (and there, again, is the illusion of chance, as it could be determined definitively using mapping data whether they had been or not). When questioned what the implications of there being no free choice were, they divided again: some argued that free will wasn’t a pre-requisite to having an impact on one’s environment, whilst others tended towards nihilism and eventually changed their minds or committed suicide.
The third group didn’t really care one way or another, and argued that so long as there was an illusion of free choice, why did it matter whether or not there was ‘true’ free choice. This camp tended to include individuals who also were indifferent to the question of the greater sentient being(s), and if they were part of a greater plan or not. They didn’t much care whether they were simply all props in a university student’s summer writing project, provided they got paid on time and their preferred sports team won in that weekend’s match.
There were, however, some events that counted as ‘true probability’, as opposed to chance based on lack of knowledge such as that of a coin flip or the roll of a die. Even then, not all chance events led to universe branches: while the decay of uranium into thorium is a true chance event, in that it may decay in any given moment with no way of knowing or predicting when, there is not a universe branch for the decay of every uranium atom, as well as all other radioactive isotopes.
Because the chance of isotopic decay increases exponentially over time (even though the chance of it decaying in any given moment remains stable), the limit to infinity places the probability of decay squarely at 1 (meaning it is guaranteed to happen). Therefore, isotopic decay would not cause branching in the long term, because in the scheme of the universe it is inevitable. Why the branching system differentiated between short term chances and long term probability remained unknown, and may or may not have been related to the greater sentient being, the whims of the universe, or yet undiscovered science.
In fact, every event that had been suggested as a possible cause for universe branching has been found to not, in fact, cause universe branching. It was known that there must be true chance events that cause universes to split, as different universes had different numbers of splits; and it was known that universes with greater numbers of sentient races tended to have more splits. However, without being able to analyse the composition of every single universe, and all its subdivisions, for the entirety of its existence (without which once could neither identify when a universe branches nor determine which branch originated from which), researchers were left to test individual theories, one by one, in the hope of one day finding the correct answer.
No one was optimistic for them.