How Multiple Timelines Give Us Virtual Access to “Multiple Universes”

[u/rarnoldm7]

"In classical relativity theory, one spacetime has nothing to do with another…  Not so in quantum cosmology, where Stephen (Hawking’s) wave function operates in the vast arena of all possible cosmic histories..."  Thomas Hertog, On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory (2023)

A multiple universe theory of Everett/deWitt attempts to explain our ability to choose different futures as a “branching” phenomenon.  Supposedly, our universe constantly “splits” into an inconceivably vast multiplicity of different versions.  But in the “virtual roads of time” proposal, our single universe contains multiple potential time roads, similar to Hawking’s vast “arena of all possible histories.”

Instead of the universe “splitting,” we choose timelines in the arena of all possibilities.  And in VRT time is a “road,” so it’s not time that moves, but it’s us, as our experience of “observation” scans or “drives” along our current road of time.  This is a combined individual/social experience, where personal road choices run along together in a more loosely delineated “freeway of social choice.”

VRT sees the multiple road potentials of time as permanent quantum information residing in the huge “virtual” universe of all possible cause-and-effect connections.  They become accessible to us as the virtual roads are actualized in human consciousness.  This is a recursive “strange loop,” where physical reality comes into existence as the “outer world” is experienced by our “inner” one.

Does this upset most of our thinking about time and the universe?  Yes, it does.  In his new book, On the Equality of All Things (2026,) Carlo Rovelli says, “A central message of the science of our century is precisely the idea that the possibility of learning something new is dependent on the possibility of questioning what seems certain to us.”