For the last couple years, people have joked that the reason things have been terrible is that we’ve been living in “the bad timeline.” But what if they’re not wrong; what if we are living in a parallel universe to the one we were in before, and that somewhere, out there, is a version of Earth where there is no pandemic, Trump was never president, and David Bowie is still alive and well and wondering if Prince and Lemmy are free for lunch.
The idea of multiverses and timelines is something writer, MIT Computer Scientist, and video game designer Rizwan Virk explores in his new book, The Simulated Multiverse: An MIT Computer Scientist Explores Parallel Universes, The Simulation Hypothesis, Quantum Computing, And The Mandela Effect (paperback, Kindle).
In the following email interview, Virk discusses what prompted him to write this book, what approach he took to it, and which fictional multiverses are closest to the ones scientists theorize may exist.