Science Fiction Vs. Fact: The Many Worlds Theory Behind Everything Everywhere All At Once

In 2022, the Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) gave the world that year's wildest mainstream movie, and got seven Academy Awards for their efforts. Sci-fi martial arts epic "Everything Everywhere All at Once" is based on the concept of a multiverse where certain characters can not only move between universes, but harness the special powers of their counterparts from alternate realities. While traversing the multiverse is firmly in the realm of science fiction, the setting itself might not be as far-fetched as you might suspect. In fact, science considers the multiverse a perfectly valid if unproven idea, courtesy of a concept known as the many-worlds interpretation.  

The many-worlds theory stems from the field of quantum mechanics. This offshoot of quantum physics attempts to investigate and explain various quantum phenomena, and it posits that every potential outcome of a certain action might happen somewhere — in other words, everything that can happen does indeed take place in one parallel universe or another. 

"Everything Everywhere All at Once" plays up the ridiculousness of this idea, depicting Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) and her family members living in and siphoning power from universes where chefs are piloted by raccoons or people have giant hot dogs for fingers. Still, the many-worlds interpretation does lend some credibility to the notion that there might be some seriously strange universes out there. In fact, a 2009 paper by Stanford University physicians Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin estimated that the multiverse might consist of at least 10^10^10,000,000 universes. That number is so incomprehensibly large that if the multiverse actually is real, maybe those hot dog fingers might have evolved in one of those alternate realities, after all. 

Before you get too excited about the multiverses in fictional works like "Everything Everything All at Once" and the Marvel Cinematic Universe being real, it should be noted that everything we know about the possible real-life multiverse is pure ideation. There is currently no way to know whether the multiverse is real, and observing or exploring other universes remains firmly in the realm of science fiction. 

The many-worlds interpretation, where every decision creates a new universe, is just one of the several multiverse theories in play, too. The cosmic inflation theory — the one that posits that the universe was originated amidst the high temperatures Big Bang and started rapidly expanding — toys with the idea that the universe's creation process led into countless alternate "bubble" universes taking shape. String theory, which seeks to find the famed "theory of everything" by positing that the smallest building blocks of reality are vibrating strings that create dimensional effects that we perceive as physics, has ideas about the multiverse that require 11 different dimensions to work. 

The "Everything Everywhere All at Once" multiverse, for the record, is based on a combination of the many-worlds interpretation and the bubble universe theory. "It's fun to imagine both versions," Daniel Kwan told The New York Times. "Both of them are pointing toward infinity or just pointing toward the unknown." As for the real multiverse, it remains little more than an alluring possibility. Perhaps the scientists looking for evidence of bubble universes from cosmic background radiation will one day find answers — but for now, the multiverse remains out of reach.