Would you trust a memory that felt as real as all your other memories, and if other people confirmed that they remembered it too? What if the memory turned out to be false? This scenario was named the ‘Mandela effect’ by the self-described ‘paranormal consultant’ Fiona Broome after she discovered that other people shared her (false) memory of the South African civil rights leader Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s.
Is a shared false memory really due to a so-called ‘glitch in the matrix’, or is there some other explanation for what’s happening? Broome attributes the disparity to the many-worlds or ‘multiverse’ interpretation of quantum mechanics.
When not directly observed, electrons and other subatomic particles diffract like waves, only to behave like particles when a measurement is made. Essentially, it’s as if these particles exist in multiple places simultaneously until directly observed. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger explained this strange concept with the ‘Schrödinger’s cat’ thought experiment in 1935. If a cat were placed in a box with a radioactive-decay-detector rigged to break a flask of poison when activated, a decaying particle existing as a wave would yield two simultaneous macroscale realities — one where the cat is alive and one where the cat is dead. Although, upon observation, one could see that the cat is either dead or alive, some quantum physicists such as the late Hugh Everett III — who first proposed the many-worlds interpretation in 1957 — have speculated that both realities exist … but in separate, parallel universes.
