Written by: Apurba Adhikari - 22005, Grade XII
Posted on: 17 September, 2021
Quantum Immortality is a bizarre thought experiment in quantum physics ascribing to the many-worlds interpretation. If many-worlds interpretation is true and quantum immortality exists then it makes every person in this world immortal. But it is to know that, it also has a good probability of being false as being true.
It all started with one of the most astonishing experiments done in human history, the double-slit experiment. The double-slit experiment tells us that every particle in the universe acts as a particle and a wave at the same time. With the same experiment, we also found out that a particle acts like a wave when no conscious observer is looking at it but acts like a particle when it is observed. This is known as the particle-wave duality. And the phenomenon of something being in two different states at the same time until measured in quantum physics is known as superpositioning. After some time, a thought experiment was done by Austrian-Irish physicist Erwin Schrödinger and the thought experiment is famously known as Schrödinger's cat. The thought experiment was keeping a cat in a box without any observers with a bomb which after a minute will blast if a certain electron is spinning clockwise but nothing will happen if it is spinning in an opposite direction. So before observing the box what will happen. From normal human logic, we can say that the cat is either dead or alive but due to the law of quantum physics and the wave-particle duality, the cat remains in a superposition of being dead and alive at the same time. There are a few interpretations for this, the most famous one is known as the Copenhagen interpretation. It says that when we observe a certain thing, its wave function collapses and becomes a particle choosing one of the possibilities. But there is another interpretation which is also really famous, it is known as the many-worlds interpretation. It says that instead of the wave function collapsing and only one possibility occurring, the universe splits into multiple parallel universes each with different occurrences. Quantum immortality adds to it by keeping a human instead of a cat. According to it, no matter how many times we try to be Schrödinger’s cat, we will always survive because our consciousness can’t exist in a universe when we are dead, so our consciousness is shifted to the parallel universe where we are alive making us unable to die or immortal. Also, it is also said that if many-world interpretation is correct, there would be a universe where no one dies making our consciousness immortal.
The concept of Quantum immortality is very hard to believe in and also looks out of the world. But the same can be said about the wave-particle duality and superpositioning. No matter how bizarre it is, the possibility of it being true also exists. Having so many theories and possibilities makes knowledge about the universe and the universe itself so interesting.
