A little knowledge (about quantum mechanics) can be a dangerous thing.

This idea first occurred to me while watching soccer. What do you make of it when there’s a controversial call and people simply disagree over what happened when watching an instant replay that’s pretty clear. Did the ball cross the goal line or not? The video, from where I’m sitting, shows the ball did not cross the line, and it shows it quite clearly. But a couple other people watching the game with me think it did. We’re looking at the same video, and it isn’t ambiguous.

Then I start asking the same question about social and political perceptions.

There are any number of possible explanations, I suppose, with one being that lots of people are stupid. But in the examples I’m talking about, I can be debating what happened with people I know are smart, they’re honest, they don’t have any kind of weird agenda, etc. In short, I know them to be people who always act in good faith.

Then I get to thinking about all of this from a quantum mechanics perspective. Not that I profess to understand quantum mechanics, but I feel like I sort of get the rough outlines here and there.

If we think about things like multiple universes and brane theory, and then we pile all of the research and speculation about the idea that we live in a simulation on top of it, and for the sake of argument, we assume that all of these people looking at the same picture or accurately reporting what they see, then … what?

So here’s my idea. You have multiple universes, but instead of being adjacent and separate, they’re overlays. We aren’t perceiving one probability curve or one brane – our consciousness is in all of them simultaneously. So when I see the receiver’s foot being clearly out of bounds, and you see the foot being clearly inbounds, we’re both right.

Now let’s apply this ridiculous notion to the disagreements we have over political issues. For one set of people, the capitalist worldview is objectively correct. For another, the socialist worldview is objectively correct. In one set, God exists and is like the version I see in the New Testament. For others, he’s an Islamist ragemonger. In a third, there’s no god.

Thinking about this too much makes my head hurt. And I’m certainly not advancing it as something that’s true. I’m just wondering if, given all we think we know about quantum mechanics, it’s something we can rule out.

Please, somebody, explain why this is a really harebrained idea.