Man, I sure do get a lot of mail from physics
fans. Let’s see what today’s haul is,
shall we, Albert?
We got another one about the Mandela effect.
This is just getting out of hand.
What? You don’t remember the Mandela effect?
The Nelson Mandela one?
You don’t, huh? Okay, well, the Mandela
effect is this pretty crazy idea that pops
up from time to time.
The name comes from Nelson Mandela, who was
a political activist in Africa. He fought
against the horrible apartheid system in South
Africa and was incarcerated from the 60s to
1990.
Some people claim to remember him dying in
prison in the 1980s when, in reality, he was
released from prison, helped overturn apartheid,
and went on to be the President of South Africa
for five years. He eventually died in 2013.
It seems that some people combine their fuzzy
and obviously unreliable memories of Mandela’s
death in the 1980s with his subsequent release
and presidency and somehow conclude that we
are somehow sliding between parallel universes.
Can you believe that, Albert?
These people have a variety of ideas about
how the transfer between parallel universes
occurs, from some sort of natural phenomena,
to it being caused by the Large Hadron Collider
in Europe.
Crazy, huh?
And that’s not the only example people cite.
People remember the name of the Berenstain
Bears books- that’s with an “A I N”-
as once being Berenstein Bears- that’s with
an “E I N”.
Or a lot of people will swear that in the
original version of the Star Wars movie “The
Empire Strikes Back” that Darth Vader said
“Luke, I am your Father” when what he
really said was
“No, I am your Father.”
There are tons and tons of claims like those
that you can find on the internet if you want.
It’s really quite depressing.
And Albert, this is just obviously silly.
I mean, even if we actually were sliding between
parallel universes- and, of course, we’re
not- how is it that our memories could survive
the change? I mean, memories are preserved
in our brain. And those memories would change
as we shifted from one universe to another.
And then, there are a few people who claim
our bodies are getting transported to other
universes where things were always different.
But thinking that that could happen without
anyone noticing is really approaching tinfoil
territory.
The best proof of this is the Berenstain Bears
example. You could go to every library on
the planet and ask people to dig out their
books and every one of them would be of the
A-I-N version. People who believe in the Mandela
Effect would say that this makes sense because
either we moved into a world in which the
spelling was always right or because the change
occurred everywhere in our universe.
But if we moved into another universe, we’d
also move into one in which our brains always
lived in the A-I-N universe. And if the change
occurred in our universe, you have to remember
that books are made of molecules just like
our brains.
Unless the change was somehow confined to
those just particular books, the changes to
the brain atoms and the book atoms would have
to be the same. We certainly wouldn’t remember
this differently.
So this Mandela Effect thing is simply silly
and just isn’t true. I’m telling you Albert,
I wish people would just get over it and stop
sending me mail and email about it.
