Shazam Resurrects Nelson Mandela with Brother Bear Berenstein’s Final Wish
Or: Mandela effect might be bullshit, or it might be 100% real. Flip a coin.
The Mandela Effect (ME from here) is huge clickbait for pseudo science sites and any traffic driven “top 5 celebrity dad bod” websites. I mean, it’s pretty fascinating to think that our own universe was destroyed and we’re existing in a parallel timeline. It’s shit straight out of an 80's sci-fi movie.
For anyone unfamiliar with ME, it hypothesizes that our universe was destroyed, and we now exist in a parallel universe. This is exhibited through minor differences between the two timelines. The common examples are many people remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 90's, but he didn’t, or people remember Sinbad playing a genie in a movie called Shazam but he never did, or people remember the BerenstEIn Bears when it’s actually spelled BerenstAIn.
This can easily be explained by the fact that people have faulty memories, but there’s actually some interesting science behind ME theory. I’m not a theoretical physicist, but I’ll try to break this down as simply as I can.
Multiverse theory
The idea is that there are infinite universes, existing parallel to our own. When I say parallel, I don’t mean in a linear fashion, I mean in a multi dimensional space. Pick a point and call that our universe. Every time an event happened differently, our own reality splits into a new parallel universe. This means that infinite universes can exist at all times, often with very similar timelines. They exist at all points around us, infinite within confined space. That doesn’t make sense, but again, none of us are quantum physicists.
ME theorists believe that during a cataclysmic event, often attributed to the large hadron collider and discovery of the Higgs Boson, that our universe shifted its energies to a parallel universe. If energy really can’t be destroyed, it has to shift to either another form or another space, and if the universe is destroyed, it has to go somewhere.
Mandela in da house
Assuming that multiverse theory is correct (and many prominent physicists including Stephen Hawking and Neil Degrasse Tyson subscribe to it), then every possibility is real in some timeline. In one, shit went wrong with the Higgs Boson and destroyed us. In another, nothing happened. In still others, we never discovered the Higgs Boson.
In our particular reality we exist in, one of two things happened. It destroyed the universe or it didn’t. That’s it. There’s not really a third option. Given that we exist, we obviously don’t live within a destroyed timeline.
That means that ME could very well be real. If it’s not, then no big deal. It’s an interesting philosophical idea. If it did, well, we can’t prove it and it’s still an interesting philosophical idea. But either one is of equal possibility.
Yep, there’s a 50/50 chance our entire universe was destroyed in a catastrophic accident caused by scientists. Chew on that for a while.
Summary (I guess)
Whether you think it’s real or not, if you entertain the possibility of parallel universes, that means it IS real. Somewhere. Maybe here, maybe not. But if you accept multiverse, then you have to accept ME, even if it’s not in our timeline.
Yes, I’m a tattoo artist who just wrote a blog about theoretical physics from a layman’s standpoint. Yes, I linked Wikipedia. Big whoop. Wanna fight about it?
