Simon didn’t want to watch Interstellar (he generally dislikes fiction and often finds it too scary as well), but somehow he did get sucked into the story after his sister and I were watching the movie right next to him for several days in a row and talking about it extensively. It’s one of my favourite films and I so much wanted Simon to see the part about time dilation and the black hole, and hear his thoughts about those scenes. I admit they were quite difficult for me to grasp when watching the film for the first time, especially the scene where the main character finds himself in the tesseract and has multiple visions of his daughter from the past. When we got to the scene, Simon was on fire. He kept walking around the room, euphoric as he was explaining to me how he understood what was happening on the screen:
“They used the many worlds interpretation! The many worlds interpretation is an interpretation of the collapsing of the wave function. It says that the wave function doesn’t collapse, we just find ourselves in a universe where it collapsed intone particular possibility. And there is theoretically another universe where something else happened and there is another version of us experiencing that. This produces uncontrollably infinitely many universes just to get out of collapsing the wave function. What they use is a metaverse – the multiverse of the many worlds interpretation!
Those grids of shelves are the multiverses! And then there’s a grid of those grids of shelves and that’s a metaverse. A metaverse of all of the multiverses of the many worlds interpretation at every single point in time!
I know why it’s 5-dimensional! It’s the 3 dimensions of space, the 4th number indicates what universe it is in the multiverse, and the last number is which multiverse it is in the metaverse! Which is a time dimension, because it’s metaverse of all the multiverses of the many worlds interpretation at every single point in time. And notice, these are all real numbers! Even the 4th and the 5th dimension can be any real number because there are only countably infinitely many natural numbers, integers and even rational numbers”.
Geeks out of the box 