8 Theories About Reality That Make You Question Everything

4. Quantum Immortality

Right, first of all, don't get any ideas.

Second of all, you might be immortal.

According to the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, every event in spacetime creates multiple separate realities containing all possible outcomes of the event. This, when related to Quantum Immortality, would mean that should you ever die, there will be an alternative timeline created in which you didn't, because there is always some probability of your surviving.

Due to the somewhat final nature of death, this would mean that, from your perspective, you would never die, because the only timelines in which you would be around to experience things are the ones in which you lived.

There was even a story (potentially apocryphal, there's not much evidence that it happened online, but it's a good demonstration of the theory nonetheless) of two students in the US that were so obsessed with the idea of quantum immortality that they devised a get-rich scheme off the back of it. The only problem is that it involved dying.

The students supposedly bought a lottery ticket and hooked themselves up to a device designed to deliver a lethal injection. They programmed it to kill them if any numbers other that theirs came up in a kind of human version of Schrödinger's Cat. Given that all probabilities are accounted for by the Many Worlds Interpretation, then the only reality in which they would survive would also be the one in which they won the lottery.

In this reality, they died, but who knows, perhaps they're partying it up in an alternative timeline somewhere.