The modern concept of possible worlds is attributed to the German polymath, co-inventor of calculus, and rival to Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, in his work Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil (1710). Born out of a need to interpret the behaviour of the smallest building blocks of our Universe, quantum physics has powered a cultural conversation from the depths of academic philosophy and science, to the pinnacle of Hollywood’s elite. Introduced in the 1950s by a graduate student, Hugh Everett, to little fanfare, and promoted in the 1970s by the physicist Bryce DeWitt, the ‘many-worlds’ interpretation of physics has captured the public imagination and flowered a burst of art and culture. But only with the advent of quantum physics and the need to interpret its counterintuitive predictions did it appear that these possibilities might be real. Each possible world becomes a reality.įor centuries, philosophers have dreamed of possible worlds. Opening the book takes her to live in that other world for as long as she feels comfortable there. Each life is a book in an infinite library. In it, a woman named Nora Seed is given the chance to live the lives she would have lived had she made different choices. In his novel The Midnight Library (2020), Matt Haig explores this concept. In our search for meaning, we fantasise about the roads not taken, and these alternative lives take on a reality of their own, and, perhaps, they are real. Writing in The Genealogy of Morals (1887), Friedrich Nietzsche said: ‘Man, the bravest animal and most prone to suffer, does not deny suffering as such: he wills it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering.’ A life apparently perfect but devoid of meaning, no matter how comfortable, is a kind of hell. Even the perfect life, the life where you have everything you want, hides its own unique struggles. Then again, perhaps I had dodged a bullet, who knows?Įvery life contains pain. Imagine a different life that I would never live.

In the years to come, whenever my work seemed dull and uninspiring, or the vagaries of funding forced me down an unwelcome path, or – worse – the NIF was in the news, my mind would turn back to that moment and ask: ‘What if?’ Imagine if I were at that other job in that other state thousands of miles away. He told me to take the university job, and so I did. I reached out to a mentor from graduate school, a physicist I respected, and asked him to help me choose. There were pros and cons in both directions. The other offer was to take a job at a university research institute. Last year, they achieved a nuclear fusion breakthrough. One was to work at a very large physics experiment on the West Coast of the United States called the National Ignition Facility (NIF).

It had repercussions for years, and at times the choice I made filled me with regret. When I was in my mid-30s, I was faced with a difficult decision.

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