{"id":236871,"date":"2026-05-10T16:03:54","date_gmt":"2026-05-10T21:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/versions-of-you-in-other-universes-may-be-subtly-affecting-your-destiny-oxford-physicist-says"},"modified":"2026-05-10T16:03:54","modified_gmt":"2026-05-10T21:03:54","slug":"versions-of-you-in-other-universes-may-be-subtly-affecting-your-destiny-oxford-physicist-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/versions-of-you-in-other-universes-may-be-subtly-affecting-your-destiny-oxford-physicist-says","title":{"rendered":"Versions of You in Other Universes May Be Subtly Affecting Your Destiny, Oxford Physicist Says"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/versions-of-you-in-other-universes-may-be-subtly-affecting-your-destiny-oxford-physicist-says.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>You may think you\u2019re the protagonist of your own story. According to Oxford physicist Vlatko Vedral, however, you\u2019re more like a puppet \u2014 whose strings are being pulled into a million parallel universes at any given time.<\/p>\n<p>As Vedral argues in a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.popularmechanics.com\/science\/a71187552\/other-universes-affect-reality\/\" rel=\"noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">recent issue of <em>Popular Mechanics<\/em><\/a>, the pop-sci version of the \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.larrygottlieb.com\/blog\/the-observer-effect\" rel=\"noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">observer effect<\/a>\u201d \u2014 where the act of observation or measurement affects a system \u2014 gets the cause-and-effect backward. The typical story goes something like this: quantum objects hang out in multiple states at once, until some observer glances over. At this point, the multiple states collapse and only one is left, an assumption that can lead various <a href=\"https:\/\/csferrie.medium.com\/do-we-create-the-very-reality-that-we-observe-c8ac6c038566\" rel=\"noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">woo-woo interpretations<\/a>, like that we create reality simply by observing it.<\/p>\n<p>Physics, Verdal says, does not support that idea. That collapse effect isn\u2019t a special power of human consciousness, but rather a fact of physics that says interactions \u2014 any interaction \u2014 forces a quantum system to commit to a definite state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You may think you\u2019re the protagonist of your own story. According to Oxford physicist Vlatko Vedral, however, you\u2019re more like a puppet \u2014 whose strings are being pulled into a million parallel universes at any given time. As Vedral argues in a recent issue of Popular Mechanics, the pop-sci version of the \u201cobserver effect\u201d \u2014 [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":511,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,47,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-236871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-neuroscience","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/511"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236871\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}