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Is there a parallel universe where the UK voted to remain?

Are alternative realities real and are there any without Brexit?
Are alternative realities real and are there any without Brexit? Are alternative realities real and are there any without Brexit?

If you didn’t vote Brexit, you might have found yourself wondering what the UK would look like right now if we were still firmly in the EU.

But what if a universe existed where we still were?

This alternative reality might be more than just a dream for disheartened remainers – many physicists think parallel universes are probably the reality.

Alternative versions of you

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So how realistic is the movie version of parallel universes, where every time you make a decision a new reality is created and stacked alongside the others, Sliding Doors style?

One idea behind this theory is that because the universe is so ridiculously huge and there are only so many ways particles can be arranged, there are likely to be repetitions.

It’s a bit like the idea of monkeys with typewriters eventually coming up with the complete works of Shakespeare. If you have enough time and monkeys, it’ll happen. And the universe has plenty of both.

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Theoretical physicist Brian Greene, author of The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, said that an infinitely large universe could boast an infinite number of parallel universes within it.

And with infinite possibilities, at least a handful will have voted Brexit, especially considering there were only a million or so votes in it for the winning side.

Greene told NPR that if the universe was a deck of cards and you shuffled it enough times you’d eventually get some repetitions, or patches of the universe that looked like ours.But not everyone agrees. Another physicist, Ethan Siegal, says that because the 13.8 billion-year-old universe has a finite age, it also has a finite size, so there are too many possible outcomes for such a theory to be correct.He wrote in a blog post: “There are a huge number of universes out there? – ?possibly with different laws than our own and possibly not? – ?but there are not enough of them to give us alternate versions of ourselves”.So there’s probably no mystical land of Remain in a far-flung corner of our current universe.

Brian Cox and the multiverse

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A Brexit-free Britain might still exist in some sense. Physicist of the people Brian Cox thinks another theory, the “many worlds” hypothesis, is realistic and he backs the idea that there are simultaneously existing universes.He told Radio 4’s The Life Scientific in 2014 that the idea of a multiverse was actually a “simpler version of quantum mechanics”.Quantum physics is as complicated as it sounds but, in essence, treats particles as waves that can exist as several states at once (think Schrodinger’s cat being both alive and dead in the sealed box).

Physicist Hugh Everett suggested way back in 1957 that, instead of opening the box and seeing if the cat was dead, two universes existed as a result – one where it was alive and one where it was dead.Even though Brexit is the reality for us, the many worlds theory would mean there are also universes where David Cameron is still PM, no-one’s grumbling about the exchange rate before their holidays and Boris Johnson is nowhere near the Foreign Office.Instead of being elsewhere in an infinite universe, these alternative realities are superimposed on to each other but we can’t see them or get there.If even the smallest quantum events, involving particles of light bouncing off things could be spitting out alternative realities, the referendum has probably gone a different way in a few of these universes.

Can anyone prove Britain voted to Remain somewhere?

As you’ve probably gathered, the theoretical physics behind parallel worlds is incredibly complex and inherently impossible to prove.And Matthew McConaughey isn’t waiting in an inter-dimensional middle place shoving things off a bookcase to let us know there’s a world beyond ours without Brexit.Interstellar GIF – Find & Share on GIPHY

It’s not just a case of scientists firing particles at each other at CERN to show whether or not there’s a multiverse either – we will probably never know.So like the Brexiteers keep saying, everyone should probably stop complaining and start trying to make the best of it.