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====Quantum theory of many worlds==== {{One source|section|date=October 2023}} While many justifications for alternate histories involve a [[multiverse]], the [[Many-worlds interpretation|"many world" theory]] would naturally involve many worlds, in fact a continually exploding array of universes. In quantum theory, new worlds would proliferate with every quantum event, and even if the writer uses human decisions, every decision that could be made differently would result in a different timeline. A writer's fictional multiverse may, in fact, preclude some decisions as humanly impossible, as when, in ''[[Night Watch (Discworld)|Night Watch]]'', [[Terry Pratchett]] depicts a character informing Vimes that while anything that can happen, has happened, nevertheless there is no history whatsoever in which Vimes has ever murdered his wife. When the writer explicitly maintains that ''all'' possible decisions are made in all possible ways, one possible conclusion is that the characters were neither brave, nor clever, nor skilled, but simply lucky enough to happen on the universe in which they did not choose the cowardly route, take the stupid action, fumble the crucial activity, etc.; few writers focus on this idea, although it has been explored in stories such as [[Larry Niven]]'s story ''[[All the Myriad Ways#story|All the Myriad Ways]]'', where the reality of all possible universes leads to an epidemic of suicide and crime because people conclude their choices have no moral import. In any case, even if it is true that every possible outcome occurs in some world, it can still be argued that traits such as bravery and intelligence might still affect the relative frequency of worlds in which better or worse outcomes occurred (even if the total number of worlds with each type of outcome is infinite, it is still possible to assign a different [[Measure (mathematics)|measure]] to different infinite sets). The physicist [[David Deutsch]], a strong advocate of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, has argued along these lines, saying that "By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives. When you succeed, all the copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.kurzweilai.net/taming-the-multiverse |title=Taming the Multiverse |publisher=KurzweilAI |access-date=|first = Marcus|last = Chown|date = 7 August 2001}}</ref> This view is perhaps somewhat too abstract to be explored directly in science fiction stories, but a few writers have tried, such as [[Greg Egan]] in his short story ''The Infinite Assassin'', where an agent is trying to contain reality-scrambling "whirlpools" that form around users of a certain drug, and the agent is constantly trying to maximize the consistency of behavior among his alternate selves, attempting to compensate for events and thoughts he experiences, he guesses are of low measure relative to those experienced by most of his other selves. Many writers—perhaps the majority—avoid the discussion entirely. In one novel of this type, H. Beam Piper's ''[[Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen]]'', a Pennsylvania State Police officer, who knows how to make gunpowder, is transported from our world to an alternate universe where the recipe for gunpowder is a tightly held secret and saves a country that is about to be conquered by its neighbors. The paratime patrol members are warned against going into the timelines immediately surrounding it, where the country ''will'' be overrun, but the book never depicts the slaughter of the innocent thus entailed, remaining solely in the timeline where the country is saved. The cross-time theme was further developed in the 1960s by [[Keith Laumer]] in the first three volumes of his ''Imperium'' sequence, which would be completed in ''Zone Yellow'' (1990). Piper's politically more sophisticated variant was adopted and adapted by [[Michael Kurland]] and [[Jack Chalker]] in the 1980s; Chalker's ''[[G.O.D. Inc]]'' trilogy (1987–89), featuring paratime detectives Sam and Brandy Horowitz, marks the first attempt at merging the paratime thriller with the police procedural.{{Citation needed|date=July 2008}} Kurland's ''[[Perchance (novel)|Perchance]]'' (1988), the first volume of the never-completed "Chronicles of Elsewhen", presents a multiverse of secretive cross-time societies that utilize a variety of means for cross-time travel, ranging from high-tech capsules to mutant powers. [[Crosstime Traffic]] is a 6-book series written by [[Harry Turtledove]] aimed at teenagers featuring a variant of H. Beam Piper's paratime trading empire. While the home timeline appears to be the same in each of the books there is no overlap in characters or repetition of the alternative worlds.
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