I understand that electrons diverge and create new universes. But surely these changes that occur with individual electrons dont result in such vastly different macro worlds? To the point that in one universe Im wearing a clown costume playing water polo because an electron in a laser behaved spun right instead of left.
In: Physics
It takes time for changes to propagate through time and space.
*If* the many worlds theory is correct (we’re not sure that it is), then a lot, maybe most, of potential choices might have no macroscopic effects. It would kind of average out, since not that many quantum effects have directly macroscopic effects.
However…the universe is also generally chaotic…*very small* changes in “initial” conditions can have wildly large impacts if you project them far enough forward in time.
The situation where you end up in a clown costume playing water polo would have had to have been an electron doing something weird possibly hundreds or thousands of years ago, and then slowly cascading effects from there.
To get an “instant” effect you need the situations where quantum effects become immediately observable. For example, bit flips in microelectronics can be caused by cosmic rays, and have caused industrial accidents. And cosmic rays come from *really* far away. So a tiny quantum effect that adjusted the direction of a cosmic ray by a ludicrously tiny amount, multiplied over the very large distance to earth, could easily cause the ray to miss the transistor it happened to hit in our universe. Macroscopic consequences blow up from there.
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