Oxford Physicist Explains How Parallel Universes Shape Your Reality

You may think you’re the protagonist of your own story. According to Oxford physicist Vlatko Vedral, however, you’re more like a puppet—whose strings are being pulled into a million parallel universes at any given time.

In a recent issue of Popular Mechanics, Vedral challenges the pop-science version of the “observer effect,” which suggests that human observation collapses quantum states into a single reality. This interpretation, he argues, gets cause and effect backward.

Physics does not support the idea that consciousness creates reality. Instead, Vedral explains, the collapse of quantum states is a fundamental property of physics: any interaction forces a quantum system to commit to a definite state.

How Quantum Interactions Shape Reality

Consider a photon hitting your sunglasses. The photon doesn’t wait for your brain to observe it. Instead, it either passes through the lens or reflects off it based on precise variables. Vedral asserts that you are shaped by the photon’s path—the “you” that receives that photon is fundamentally different from the “you” that doesn’t.

Extrapolating this idea leads to a mind-bending conclusion: both versions of “you” continue to exist simultaneously, but the “you” that consciously perceives the light is shunted onto a different quantum path.

“Without too much exaggeration, it’s fair to say that all quantum experiments are really just more or less complicated versions of Schrödinger’s.” — Vlatko Vedral

The Multiverse of “Yous”

With every quantum interaction branching into new parallel universes, infinite versions of “you” emerge at any moment. Vedral writes that the elements of reality encoded in quantum objects are fundamental, and each observation shapes not just this reality but all others.

In Vedral’s view, somewhere out there exists a cooler, luckier version of you living your best life—while the version reading this article is stuck with the short end of the stick.