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By Stav Dimitropoulos Published: Sep 17, 2026 3:45 PM EDT Save Article Share Article Listen (10 min) 10 min Getty Images Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: Our universe has cracks, linking us to others, a quantum physics theory says. This opens the door to another version of you existing in some other universe. There could be a way to find out, too, using an AI-powered quantum computer, a scientist says. However, engaging in real interaction between universes would break the rules of physics. At the same time, the idea persists, because so far, we have no actual way to disprove such inter-universe activity. I magine waking up to find a solved equation on your desk that you never worked on and can’t remember deriving. The math checks out, and there’s no missing notebook, no forgotten late-night session. Where did it come from? A recent theoretical proposal in quantum physics uses this kind of scenario as a thought experiment, raising a fascinating and unsettling question: could another version of “you” have cracked the equation in a parallel branch of the universe? If true, the idea would blow past one of physics’ most sacred limits: that parallel versions of reality can never talk to each other. And if information could leak between outcomes, it could mean god-like powers—scoring straight A’s without studying, warning of accidents before they happen, even gaming markets to amass immeasurable fortunes. The idea comes from a not-yet-peer-reviewed paper posted to arXiv in January by quantum physicist Maria Violaris, PhD, in which she challenges a long-held assumption in quantum physics. Once reality splits under the many-worlds interpretation, the assumption holds that every quantum outcome produces a separate, non-interacting version of reality—and that those outcomes can never exchange information. Getty Images In terms of Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, the traditional many-worlds interpretation suggests that when you open the box, a new universe will split off. In one reality, the cat will be alive. In the other, the cat will be dead. This also implies that there may be a version of you that won the lottery—and didn’t end up with another dud scratcher. Violaris uses a highly idealized “Wigner’s friend” thought experiment, a classic scenario in which one observer is treated as a quantum system fully controlled by another. In this setup, an external controller has quantum control over the observer placed into a superposition of two outcomes. In quantum mechanics, superposition means that a system can follow multiple possible outcomes at once until it is measured. Take Agent A and Agent B. These are not separate people, but two branch-level copies of the same observer inside the same scenario. A separate, supervising “Wigner” figure, who remains outside the system, presumably has complete quantum control over their internal states. What Violaris says is that this outside controller, by manipulating the full quantum state of the system, can make a message written in one parallel world cross over to the other. There is a serious catch, however, and violating it would break the rules of quantum mechanics, she says: The observer who wrote the message must lose all memory of having done so. That memory-erasure requirement is the most counterintuitive caveat of the proposal, and one Violaris herself can’t keep stressing enough. From the receiver’s point of view, the information must appear without any local origin—a kind of God-sent bonanza, much like the mysteriously-appearing equation mentioned previously. And there are two other constraints looming just as large. First, the entire scenario requires a figure with extraordinary powers. You need someone, Violaris says, “who is able to control what’s on the inside, quantum mechanically,” meaning someone who can isolate another observer from the environment and manipulate their entire quantum state, much like the classic Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, in which the cat is trapped in the box and could be alive or dead based on an outsider’s observation. Second, the setup only works if the participants involved exist in a genuine quantum superposition, a condition that does not occur naturally for human-scale systems. Once those provisos are in place, the problem starts drifting into philosophy and individual identity. “For example, you could interpret this switching process as turning one observer into the other observer,” Violaris says. At this level of abstraction, there is no observable difference between moving an observer between worldlines and replacing one observer’s entire internal state with another’s—which is why the experiment blurs the line between communication and transformation. That equivalence troubles some physicists. “If you look at what’s actually going on, it would be much more natural to say that the experimenter simply swaps the identities of the two observers,” says Scott Aaronson, PhD, a theoretical computer scientist and director of the Quantum Information Center at the University of Texas at Austin. In Aaronson’s reading, no information really travels between universes. Instead, “the observer who wrote the message has been deleted from his branch, and replaced by the other observer who didn’t write it.” Given the “godlike power over observers being assumed here,” he adds, the result is not especially useful, except perhaps for “teeing up some fun philosophical arguments about the nature of identity.” Even though it has no practical value, the theoretical idea refuses to fade—not because the physics objections vanish, but because the implications keep stirring the imagination. But skip philosophical enlightenment and think in terms of the real economy—a collusion between your own different interbranch versions. What if you could take information from universe B and transfer it to universe A to get rich and powerful? It’s still you doing the sneaking, after all—what’s the problem? Enter futurist Alexey Turchin, who has floated the idea of “multiverse arbitrage,” situating Violaris’s thought experiment alongside earlier proposals like that of physicist Rainer Plaga, who proposed that exquisitely isolated trapped ions could, in principle, act as one-time “gateway states” between different outcomes. It’s not to prove that such arbitrage is feasible, but as part of a long-running attempt to test whether the many-worlds interpretation is truly impenetrable to all information leakage. “If it is possible, a lot of money can be earned on things like high-frequency trading,” Turchin says. At the same time, he adds that in Violaris’s setup, “not much useful information can be sent.” Violaris herself stresses that even her own proposal leaves little room for such fantasies. “Everything is mediated by the super observer,” she says. The local observers “don’t control message transport,” while the controlling figure “doesn’t know the message contents,” so it’s an asymmetric distribution of power and knowledge. It makes freely harvesting information from the other universe far less plausible. More importantly, where would we even find such a controller? “You and I can’t communicate with versions of ourselves in the multiverse,” Violaris says, because we’re not living inside an engineered environment where someone can “control what’s on the inside, quantum mechanically.” More Versions of You You Shift to a Parallel Universe When You Die You Don’t Affect Reality—It Affects You You Could Be Visiting Other Dimensions in Dreams The only way she can imagine approximating such a “multiverse crack” is with a fully fledged quantum computer that could represent an observer within a quantum system. It would need to run an artificial general intelligence (AGI) capable of reasoning across domains. Violaris is cautiously optimistic that researchers may find a pathway toward such machines in the next 10 to 20 years. But, don’t imagine chatting with your parallel self. Instead, picture artificial agents inside tightly controlled quantum systems that are designed and puppeteered by human researchers, she says. These AIs probe slightly different outcomes in parallel and feed their results back into a single decision-making process. But even if that happens, how can you be sure the AI inside the simulation is an authentic digital stand-in? For any of this to work, you need observers that actually behave like thinkers, capable of forming memories, generating ideas, and then losing those thoughts in a precisely controlled way. In other words, the AI would need cognition, memory, and something uncomfortably close to consciousness itself—a phenomenon we still don’t understand even in flesh-and-bone humans. “That part feels much further off,” Violaris says. “A major breakthrough would be needed in AGI or observer simulation.” So for now, we can assume no lottery numbers are sliding across universes. No alternate you is whispering tomorrow’s headlines. That kind of human-scale maneuvering seems out of reach. But the tantalizing mystery of a potential crack between universes endures: perhaps there really is a solved equation with no author, sitting there on the desk. And you can’t prove anything. Download Pop Mech Digital Issues Get the issue Popular Mechanics Get the issue Popular Mechanics Get the issue Popular Mechanics Get the issue Popular Mechanics Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the Issue Get the Issue Stav Dimitropoulos Contributor Stav Dimitropoulos is a Gold and Community Anthem Award–winning journalist, and writes about consciousness, science, and culture for Popular Mechanics , Nature , and the BBC. Her work often explores mind-stretching angles where science meets philosophy. Her debut nonfiction book, Slow, Lazy, Gluttons (Greystone Books, 2026) asks: What if the traits society shames — laziness, darkness, nostalgia, and more — are actually survival superpowers? 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