Dreaming of Infinite Quantum Lilies

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This is not a normal piece of writing for me. I’ve had bits and pieces of it mind for a long time and will say simply that, though I wasn’t motivated to write it primarily due to the symposium, this is my submission for the STSC Symposium around the topic of "Dreams.”

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The following piece has tried to write itself several times and I’ve always hesitated since it is “just” about a cat, but, if you manage to bear with this long piece to the end, you’ll see it’s not really about a cat or, more correctly, it’s not only about a cat.  If it’s too long to read, that’s OK, it’s taken me tremendous courage to publish this, so I’m not 100% sure I want anyone to read it anyway.

I’ve previously hesitated to finish it because I didn’t want to be insensitive to those who’ve lost loved ones in their lives – family members, friends, spouses, parents or children – by “whining” about my lost pet, but, this time, my daemon muse insisted that this had to be shared.  So, against my rational self’s better judgment, here it is. There is an undercurrent in the piece that, on the surface, is about the loss of a very special pet, but deeper down it’s really about everyone I’ve lost, it’s about all of those that we’ve all loved and lost.  For me, “Lily” represents all of those loved people.

On June 16th, 2023, after being sidetracked all morning, I finally sat down around 12:50 to get some work done. At 1:22pm my cell phone rang. My mom. My blood ran cold. I answered the phone and said “hey.” She hesitated, and I already knew what she was going to say. She sighed, and then said simply “Danny died.” My wife could tell, from my face, that the worst had happened and fell to the floor sobbing. I sat dazed while my mom explained the few details we had. I can’t remember what else she said.

We had lost our brother-in-law, Danny, with whom we were extremely close.  I, we both, considered him our true brother. He was young, far too young, and his death came rather unexpectedly. 

His spouse, my little sister, said to me shortly after his death that she wished someone could just give her something real that she could hold onto to know that he was okay…out there….somewhere.  Not more platitudes, such as “He’s in a better place.”  Or bogus signs, “I saw a rainbow, with butterflies flitting about” or repeating what various religious texts have to say on the matter which, at the surface level, boils down to “it says so in the book” and “have faith.” [1]

No, she asked me for something real, something one could point to and, although she didn’t use the word, dare I say that perhaps she meant something scientific?   

At the time, I had nothing to give and nothing to say - for what can any of us say?  The question of what happens after we pass has haunted humans…for as long as there have been humans.   After all, we are blessed and doomed by a mind that can conceptualize immortality while being trapped in mortal bodies. But surprisingly, a few weeks later, I remembered something.    I remembered that I might have one infinitesimally small glimmer of something real to share after all. And I remembered the comfort and joy – joy tinged with heartbreak…a bittersweet joy – but joy nonetheless… that I felt at the startling realization that I attempt to capture in this story.

***

I open my eyes.  It’s light outside.  And that light stabs a spear of pure darkness through my heart. 

Morning is here. 

And this is the day that my angel, Lily, will leave this world. 

It is no longer in the future. 

Still, I can pretend for a few more minutes. I roll over, put my arm around my wife and bury my head into her hair, pressing my forehead to her back and closing my eyes, as if shutting out sight of the world could change it or make it go away. 

Ironically, Lily had taught me this trick. 

Often, when I picked her up, especially over the past couple of months, she would bury her head into my neck or press her forehead to my face. I felt like she was trying to shut out reality too. I felt her trying to pretend for a moment that things were the way they used to be. 

So I lay here, silent, holding my wife, trying to build up the courage to face the day.

***

“You see, class, quantum mechanics is strange, but the best way to think about it is this - light, and all subatomic particles, exist as both a wave and a particle.” said my high school physics teacher, Mr. Potter.

Pan the camera to the class scratching their heads.

“A photon (or electron, etc) travels as a wave until the moment it is observed.  Then, when observed, the wave function ‘collapses’ and the particle appears somewhere along a range of probabilities which we can calculate in advance.  So we don’t know where exactly the particle will be until we observe it, but we can calculate a probability of it being in a specific location.”

“How can something be both a particle and a wave?” someone asked.  A reasonable question, I thought.

“It’s best to just accept the theory and get on with the math.  We know the math works, so the theory is probably right.  You’ll get used to it.”

***

On a whim, I pick Lily up and put her on the bed. 

Months ago, before she started having symptoms, she always slept on the bed with us but she had spent the last two months mostly sleeping by herself.  As her disease grew, her time with us shrank.  It stole not only her life energy, but also robbed us of the precious time we had left.  Fuck cancer.  And she now frequently retreats into dark places to sleep for ever-increasing amounts of time daily.

I had tried to gently coax her to lay with us a couple of times recently, but she never stayed anymore. 

But this time, a small miracle occurs,  she stays.

She purrs a tiny bit, as much as she can.  Purring has become difficult for her and now often devolves into wheezing, so I suspect that’s why she has avoided purring and, by extension, us.  Perhaps that’s why she usually avoids laying with us now.  But this time, she stays next to us for a couple of minutes while we both pet her. It reminds us all of how things were. It feels like a silent farewell of sorts. 

Once I have girded myself as well as one can for what is to come, I get up and distract myself with my “normal routine.” 

Pour the morning caffeine. Check.

Make the bed. Check.

Feed Lily. Oh right. Don’t need to feed Lily. 

Sigh.

I dial the number to the Feline Health Clinic. I’ve dialed it so many times in the past three months that I have it memorized - 555-CATS - clever.

How do you ask someone to kill your angel? 

How do you ask someone to kill a soul that you love with all your heart?

“Feline Health Clinic,” says a cheerful morning voice.  Too cheerful.

 “I think my cat needs to be put to sleep.”

“How soon can you get here?” she asks.

She doesn’t sound cheerful anymore.

Does it matter what time?

“Whatever works for you,” I say.

“Can you be here by 9:00?”

“OK, I’ll be there.”

I hang up.

I glance at the digital clock beside the bed…..its big white LED letters proclaim that it is currently 8:09.

***

Now, what this “wave particle duality" means in practice - Mr. Potter continued - is that a particle, and by extension…everything…exists in all possible states until it is observed.  This is known as ‘superposition’ and is best known in pop culture as the famous thought experiment known as ‘Schrödinger's cat.’

Here’s the thought experiment: a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor, such as a Geiger counter, detects radioactivity of even a single atom decaying, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison, which, unfortunately for our hapless feline, kills him. 

The usual interpretation of quantum mechanics, known as the ‘Copenhagen’ interpretation implies that, after a while, the cat must be simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. It is the moment of observation in which the probabilities collapse and the poor (or happy) cat’s fate is sealed.

“Why did ol’ bastard Schrödinger pick a cat?”,  I wondered.  “Why not Schrödinger’s cockroach?”

***

9:00 looms.

We have an appointment for Lily’s last breath. 

It’s 8:09. 

51 minutes.

I throw myself into getting ready. 

Brush teeth, brush hair, shave. 

Why am I shaving?  I shave anyway.

I get dressed. 

Nylon joggers and a brown pullover. I worry if the black tee-shirt  underneath the pullover goes with the outfit.  My urge is to ask my wife.  I decide that it doesn’t matter.

My wife and I agree not to use the cat carrier for once. Lily hates it anyway.  We’ll just let her rest in the soft  little enclosed box that she naps in. My wife worries that she’ll be cold. 

“Maybe we should add a blanket.” she says.

“Whatever.”

We’re both coping. I’m worried about my fucking tee-shirt and she’s worried about our angel needing a blanket for the box for the five minute car ride.  We’re both ignoring reality.

“I’m taking Lily outside” I say. 

“OK”. 

I set Lily down by the door and open it. She walks out slowly and stops and looks at me. I think she’s too weak to do her normal routine. She’s hardly eaten anything in the past two days. I had been helping her eat but she had told me the day before yesterday that she was done. I probably would have taken her yesterday, but it had been a holiday.  So, I pick her up again and walk around the back yard with her.

“Here’s your favorite tree,” I show her. 

“Look there’s birds in the shrubs,” I tell her as we see a fluttering of wings in the shrubs. Lily’s ears perk up and she looks at the disturbance in the leaves. For a split second doubt crushes me, and I wonder if I’m making a horrible mistake. I carry her around the yard to all the places she usually goes and then set her down on the sofa on our back patio. 

She and I sit there enjoying the burgeoning day. 

My wife opens the back door.  I walk over to her and we hug. 

We look up, Lily is walking, slowly, toward the door. She’s coming home. We are both so glad that she thinks of our house as her home and that, when she feels bad, she comes home.

“I guess it’s time,” I say. 

“OK”. 

My wife picks up Lily and kisses her, “Lily I Love You” she says. 

Jesus this is difficult. 

We put Lily in her little nap-box and then put the box in my car. We both spend too long fumbling with the seatbelt, trying to secure the box. We’re worried and we’re stalling. We don’t want Lily to get hurt.  It feels surreal.

“Be careful, everything I love is in your car” my wife says. 

“I will,” I promise her.

“I love you”

“I love you”

***

I never quite understood quantum mechanics as Mr. Potter described it, and the idea that a human being simply “observing” the world could alter reality so drastically just felt, well, wrong.  

But then, being an auto-didact, in my own reading, I learned about something called the “many-worlds interpretation”, which espouses a very different solution to the quantum strangeness of the wave/particle duality required by the Copenhagen interpretation.   The “many worlds” interpretation was first proposed by Hugh Everett and it does not single out observation as a special process. 

In the many-worlds interpretation, we live in a multiverse of infinite universes, and these universes can, in some cases, slightly interfere with one another slightly at the quantum level.  

***

I drive to the Feline Health Clinic. 

I leave the radio off. I’ve learned that. Leave the radio off. If a song you love comes on during a drive like this, you’ll associate the song with the moment. I don’t want to be reminded of this moment just because some future DJ decides to play a song. 

We arrive. 

They escort me into the room where Lily will leave this world. 

At the Feline Health Clinic, which only treats cats, every room is based on a famous cartoon cat. Today, I’m escorted into the Cat in the Hat room. The room is covered…more like every surface is plastered…with pictures of The Cat in the Hat and with Dr. Suess memorabilia. The biggest poster in the room bears the title, “10 Quotes by Dr. Suess.” 

And the first quote, number one, numero uno, right up front and center is Don’t cry for what you’ve lost. Smile for what you had.

I wonder if they put me in this room on purpose because of that quote. Maybe they try to make everyone feel a little bit better by putting them in the Cat in the Hat room with the feel-good motivational poster.

Then I remember that two of our previous cats were put to sleep in a different room. So I take it as a sign that I should do what the poster says. Smile for what you had. I do.  

Lily is looking around now. She even meows. 

“It’s going to be okay, Lily,” I say. 

She calms down. I pet her and tell her everything's okay and that I love her. Somehow, my voice calms her. It always has. I remember how terrified she used to be of thunderstorms.  Those huge south Texas boomers would move through and one night, when she was still an outside cat who came around to see us, she got trapped outside somewhere during a torrential downpour accompanied by a lightning storm.  She showed up hours later, after it passed, at our back door, completely covered in mud, shivering, and asked to come inside.  We brought her in, we cleaned her up, and this little stray who adopted us became our inside cat that very night. It was a September 21st, so I always remember her for a moment when the Earth, Wind and Fire song plays.  Anyway, after that, when the big boomers came through, I would pet her and say “It’s okay Lily.” And she actually  would calm down like she trusted me completely. I guess she did trust me completely.

So, I tell her now that everything is okay and I feel like a liar. 

I hope it’s okay for her and that her fight will be over. 

But It’ll never quite be okay for me. A bright light of my world is about to go out. 

“It’s okay” I whisper to both of us.

***

I had heard of the many worlds interpretation but always dismissed it, as many do, as “crazy.”  Until one day I read the book The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch.  

Deutsch, an Oxford physicist, is one of the  leading quantum physicists working today.  You’ve probably heard more about quantum mechanics in the past few years because Google, IBM, Microsoft and others have already built quantum computers that operate according to Deutsch’s theories.  And the tech companies are locked in a race to build ever more powerful quantum computers.  So the whole area of ‘quantum computing’ appears in the news cycle from time to time as each of them announcing some kind of breakthrough as they work on creating ever more powerful working quantum computers.

Deutsch, who, as I mentioned, developed the leading theories on quantum computing, not only strongly believes that the “many worlds” or multiverse interpretation is the correct one, but he actually walks you through, in his book, with very convincing evidence from actual and thought experiments, as to why it is the correct interpretation.  And, in his mind, conclusively the only interpretation.

Photons, according to Deutsch, aren’t waves at all, they are particles and they are always particles, but as they interfere with their counterparts in similar other universes at the quantum level, they appear to us, limited to one universe as we are, as “waves.”  Think about billiard balls interfering with one another as they bounce off each other, but some of the billiard balls are invisible because they are in another universe that is “close” to ours.  Wouldn’t that look strange?  It would, but only if you didn’t believe in the parallel universe.

This idea of infinite universes forms the whole basis of quantum computing -  in a quantum computer the workload is split between trillions of universes and then recombined into the answer.  That is why if a large enough quantum computer is built it will be trillions of times faster than classical computers - The processing is happening in parallel across trillions of universes simultaneously.

***

The vet comes in. 

It’s the vet I don’t like. 

I was hoping for Dr. N.   I’ve seen Dr. N cry when having to put a cat to sleep and I know that, not only is he the best medically, but, I know he truly cares.

This vet is cool, professional, and distant.  She tends to overreact, ordering test after test and scaring the bejeezus out of us because “this is very serious” only to have the tests all come back negative to be told “your cat has a cold.”   I haven’t had good experiences with her in the past (nor have our cats).  I might not have come today if I had known it was her. But, I force myself to dismiss that thought -  Lily’s situation is too critical now - even this vet can’t overreact this time.

She reviews Lily’s situation and tells me I’m doing the kindest thing possible, which annoys me.  Probably because I already don’t like her, and my dislike is surfacing in annoyance that is intensified in the surreal depression of the moment.  But to me, her words feel fake. I wonder if she says that to everyone who’s forced to euthanize their cat. I force myself to nod, trying not to look annoyed.

She explains what’s going to happen but I’m not listening anymore. I’ve heard it three times before with past cats. 

I know what’s going to happen. I’m staring at Lily, petting her. Calming her. 

“Okay,” I nod to the vet.

I kneel down to be eye-to-eye with Lily. And, I hold her paw. 

Lily, unlike any cat I’ve ever had before, actually prefers to “hold hands.” The only exposed skin on cats is their paw pads (and nose tip). Lily, of course, like all cats, enjoys being pet on her back or head, but she always wants to touch me skin-to-skin. And that means touching my hands (or face) to her paw pads. 

So I hold her hand, look her in the eye and whisper, “It’s okay Lily.”

The light leaves her eyes. 

It isn’t okay. But she isn’t in pain. 

I’m in a daze. 

They put Lily in a box lined with a plastic bag. I somehow carry the box to the front, pay, and drive home. 

***

“That was fast, too fast,” my wife says. 

I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything. 

She’s already cleaning up all the cat stuff in the house.  For the first time in our lives, we don’t have another cat in the house, so we decide just to store all the cat toys, litter boxes, etc.  I can’t stand still, I’m itching to go dig Lily’s grave, just to do something. That’s how we cope, just do what needs to be done, don’t think about what’s really happening. 

“Let’s eat breakfast first,” she says. 

How can I just eat breakfast? Lily’s gone. 

“Okay” I say.

After breakfast, I change, and go to dig Lily’s grave. 

A fat possum waddles down our back pathway and past the area where I plan to dig. I’m burying her beneath her favorite oak tree. She spent hours sitting below this tree, watching the world, sometimes rolling in the dirt. It’s one of the places she was happiest. It’s odd to see the fat possum out and about during the daytime. He sees me coming and climbs a tree. The tree. Lily’s favorite oak tree. Lily’s tree. I wonder if Lily knew this possum. Lily was kind and loving to everyone and everything.  I don’t think I ever once heard her hiss.  When she lived outside, before she had officially adopted us, she was happy to share her food with birds, possums, racoons and other cats. I remember looking out the back window once and seeing her sitting back-to-back with a possum. She was cleaning her fur contentedly and the possum was eating her food. Maybe this is that possum. Maybe he came to pay his last respects to Lily.  I give him a nod and then feel like a dork for doing so.

***

Deutsch argues that the many worlds interpretation is superior to the Copenhagen interpretation because it explains how our perceptions of quantum reality actually work. 

It's not that the universe has some hidden mechanism...which isn’t "real" in a meaningful sense (such as ‘observation’ by a person)...that chooses which possible reality to make actual through some mysterious process that depends on unseen variables and can only be described probabilistically. 

No, he claims, instead, it's that every potential reality is equally realized, none preferred, and we and all our counterparts are all equally baffled as to why our respective universes were "chosen" simply because we can't communicate with one another across universes.

***

I start digging. 

The weather is gorgeous. Bright, sunny…but cool. Lily’s favorite. 

I feel guilty. Maybe I should have waited so she could have been outside today. I could have taken her Monday instead.  But no, she hadn’t eaten for two days, she was in pain, she told me she was ready.  There is no question in my mind, she was ready.  Yesterday, New Year’s Day, had been equally gorgeous and I had spent the whole day outside with her.  It was a good last day, given the circumstances.

Digging a grave is a strange experience. I have a shovel and a borrowed crowbar. The work is slow, the ground here is basically one huge slab of limestone.  My arms ache. I think about how out of shape I am. I keep digging. Something about the rhythm of the pounding helps me. It’s cathartic somehow. And it’s something I can do for her.  It’s the only thing left I can do for her.  I continue digging until there is no digger left, only the digging. I hear a cat meowing in the distance. 

“It must be mourning Lily,” I think, and then realize that I’m just looking for meaning in anything and everything. 

My wife comes out just as I’m getting the hole to the right depth. (Which it turns out, is three feet and in our world, turning more inhuman by the day, you can find SEO spam ranking in Google targeting the phrase How to Bury a Dead Cat all to garner yet a few more ad impressions. What is wrong with us?)

“Do you want to say anything?” I ask. 

She hesitates. 

“I feel like I already said everything to her while she was alive,” I add. 

“Me too,” she says. 

“Do you want to put anything in the grave with her?” I ask. 

“Like what?” she asks. 

“I don’t know, something she loved?” 

“It’s just an empty vessel, Lily’s in heaven now.” 

“Okay” 

She goes back inside. I open the box. It looks like Lily’s asleep. She looks peaceful.  I pet her. She feels the same. I pretend for a moment that I’m just petting her while she sleeps, then I feel weird for doing so.  Jesus Christ I love her. I close the box, put it in the hole and start pushing the dirt back in. 

“Let’s put this in with her.”

I look up.  My wife is back. 

She has Lily’s favorite toy - a soft multi-colored-harlequin ball toy. 

I place it in the grave and finish filling in the dirt. 

***

Back to ol’ bastard Schrödinger’s cat in the box (he could have picked a cockroach, as we said before).... 

We don’t know, and we can’t determine until we open the box, if the cat is alive or dead, and thus, this ‘not knowing-ness’ is officially called Indeterminacy.

Classically, indeterminacy means that the system exists in all states until the point you observe it, at which point the wave of possibilities collapses into the one that becomes reality.

But, under the many-worlds interpretation of quantum indeterminacy, when you put the cat in the box, the universe splits into two, one in which the cat lives and another in which it dies. When you open the box, you find out which universe you're in and your counterparts in the other universes find out which one they're in.

***

I sit in the living room, jazz playing, glass of wine in hand, my wife next to me, reading The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch.  

It’s not a textbook, but following the thought experiments that Deutsch lays forth takes more mental attention than most books.  I’ve been reading it a chapter or two at a time, and for some reason, on this night, as the jazz plays, it all suddenly clicks.

My god, he’s right, this explains everything much more cleanly and simply than what Mr. Potter taught me.  The double-slit experiment looks like a wave pattern due to quantum interference from other universes.  And in those other universes are counterparts to the experimenter in our universe.  The multiverse is true.

Then the real lightbulb goes off….

That means….oh my god…..that means where there is a universe where Lily is alive, there is a universe where she never got sick, there is a universe where she is here with me right now. 

(And surely, since all possible universes must exist, there is a universe where Lily is a flying angel cat from a mystical place called Felinius where flying angel-cats’ spirits live and frolick in happiness when they are not in an earthly form tending to the souls of humans.)

And yes, that means, there is a universe where everyone I’ve ever lost and everyone anybody has ever lost is alive……

Bittersweet joy.

***

I meditated outside this morning.

I learned the practice of meditation from books but I learned the art of meditating outside from you.

I remember all the dawns and dusks we spent together sitting in the backyard. I would watch you spend an hour just communing with nature in a state of pure bliss. There was no past, there was no future. There was only the eternal now that we shared with each other, with the birds, with the squirrels, and with the wind.

You taught me about the peaceful, eternal now and how that peace opens the door to everything else - to joy. To love. Your time with me was a short eternity.

I was watching a television show and one of the characters said the following:

When you love someone, you give up a little piece of yourself to live within them.

And they give up a little piece of themselves to live within you.

And thus, when you died, Lily, that little piece of me, that lived inside of you, died with you, leaving a gaping hole.

But conversely, a little piece of you lives within me still, and when I meditate in nature, in our back yard…in your backyard, that little piece of you lives again, for just a moment refilling that hole as we step into the peaceful, eternal now. And you once again revel in the sheer delight of feeling the wind on your face and the sounds of birds frolicking.

And for a moment, I stare into your eyes - the golden color of your eyes with the reddish-brownish line around your iris…the white fur on your nose with that same tiny little tuft of fur that always sticks up…this white fur continuing up your nose, blending into tabby of your "mask."  I pet the top of your head, split evenly right down the middle - orange fur on one side, and black fur on the other which continues down the back of your neck.  And your ears, those cute ears, one with a tiny tear in it that must have occurred when you were still a scrappy  outside cat, before you adopted us. 

And I reach out, and touch your paw, and you spread your toes out and hold the tip of my finger.

And finally, all rational thoughts I might have disappear for a few eternal minutes, and in that ethereal space, we are again together and we are again happy. And, as I transcend the rational part of my mind, I ascend into that mystical universe where the angel cats live, and where we can follow The Legends of Lilinthia Lightbringer….

Lilinthia Lightbringer was cleaning her fur,

when the King of Felinius sauntered up with a purr.

Felinius is the realm where angel cats play,

and the leaves dance with sunlight while the birds sing each day.

The angel cat realm has a clear bright blue sky, 

And the cats all have wings that allow them to fly!

So, while cleaning her fur, tabby, white, orange and black,

Lilinthia listened as she cocked one ear back.

“I come bearing news” said the King with a grin,

while his tail swayed in time with the slow steady wind.

“You must leave our Felinius for a short time away,

you are needed on earth, more with each passing day!”

“The seers have counseled, and the counselors have seen, 

A family’s in trouble, and your help do they need.”

“So a decree I have made and I’m letting you know, 

only you, Lilinthia can save them, so to earth you must go!”

[Lily, a Norwegian forest cat]

“But The trees and the birds and the and the snow on the rise

All the things that I love right in front of my eyes!”

“I chase down the birds, and have angel cat races

The wind brings me stories from faraway places!”

“The snow cools me down and the sun warms my skin 

and the squirrels chase each other, while I scratch my chin.”

“And the bright clear blue sky, and the space that it brings,

gives me the room to soar high with my angel cat wings!”

“There is nowhere finer than here, oh my King,

So why would I leave these most wondrous things?”

[The King]

“Felinius is home and it’s wondrous it’s true,

but spreading love is our mission and for these people, that’s you.”

“They need your compassion and your joy and your kindness.

They’ve forgotten what matters, you must cure their blindness!”

“Teach them to live, to love and not fight,  

bring them your peace, your love and your light!”

“Lilinthia Lightbringer, you are the one!  

Go tend to your people, and fly home when you’re done!”

“But, there is one more thing that I simply must know, 

and I must know it now before you must go

did a fuzzy red ball just roll by in the snow?”

Lily’s head whipped around, and off a tree that ball bounced.

They were off like a shot!  Ready to pounce!

And they chased that red ball for the rest of the day, 

because the angel cats know it’s not life without play!

And, whether any of this is true, or all in my mind…whether there is some multiverse spanning consciousness or not…these things matter not, because, they are true for me, and when I close my eyes….

…I Dream of Infinite Quantum Lilies.

---

My soul sings at the idea that somewhere, in another universe, Lily is alive.  And this isn’t a crackpot theory. Increasingly, evidence confirming this theory has been found and is continuing to mount.  It explains quantum behavior, quantum computers based upon these theories already work, and in the world of relativity, the theory that multiple universes were spawned by faster-than-light-inflation of the early universe was waiting only for the discovery of gravitational waves as confirmation. Those gravitational waves, by the way, were finally observed in 2015, all but confirming both faster-than-light inflation and multiple universes. These are scientific discoveries of immense proportion.

No, the multiverse is an increasingly mainstream, accepted-by-top-scientists-of-our-day theory about how reality truly works. (Though we will never know fully how reality works).

And so, to my sister, on her search for something real, perhaps scientific - this piece probably isn’t much of an answer, but it’s the closest thing to an answer I have found.

This (probable, in my mind) truth doesn’t bring Lily back to me, but it does mean, perhaps, that she is out there somewhere happy, and somewhere with another version of me.  And that is enough.  

I was going to end here with some kind of platitude about that but I think I’ll just let the piece speak for itself.

---

If you’d like to learn more about how reality works, and delve much deeper into these ideas than I could in this piece, I highly recommend you read The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch and his equally brilliant and mind-blowing The Beginning of Infinity. 

In addition, the following article provides a good overview of Deutsch’s thinking, how the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics works, along with the revelation that Schrödinger himself did not believe in the “collapse” of the wave function and did (contrary to the usual story), himself, believe in the many worlds interpretation:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-many-worlds-theory/

For further reading, many of Deutsch’s ideas were influenced by the thinking of the renowned twentieth-century philosopher Karl Popper.

---

Lily

Lilinthia Lightbringer

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Footnotes:

1. I’m certainly not saying, especially for those who have deep conviction and have had supernatural and mysterious occurrences in their life, that faith is wrong. I’ve had a couple of those occurrences in my own life. But believing in these things still takes a degree of faith and even the most devout believer’s faith can be questioned when face with a life-changing loss of such magnitude.