The "variance" of physics Physical / Metaphysical Law in Okanverse | World Anvil
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The "variance" of physics

The scientist Max Tegmark once advanced the proposition: that our universe is not simply part of a multiverse of causally distant branes, inflationary bubbles or branching timelines, but that in fact every logically coherent set of physical laws one could imagine was real somewhere. The essence of our world was math, he thought, and therefore every possible model must take part in its totality, what he called the Ultimate Ensemble, the highest possible category of multiverse.   There was only one problem: even if it existed, no one could imagine how we would ever be able to know. The laws of physics are, after all, a description of the rules by which all things in the world are capable of interacting with each other. Though we may never know the full truth, we can always take it as a given that the relationships between all things in the world must be ultimately described by a single mathematical model, regardless of how different the world may seem from one place to another. If this were not true of any two objects, then it would be impossible for one object to ever detect the existence of the other, because if something were truly different about the underlying physics governing their function, then it would be impossible to speak of them existing relative to one another at all.   Multiverses outside of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics became popular in the Capitalist Age scientific world as an extension of the anthropic principle. The values of fundamental physical qualities were thought to be unusually fine tuned; many scientists strove for a theory of everything where each physical law neatly predicted the rest, but others argued that humans may exist simply by chance, and due to the fact that they would have to exist in order to fancy the matter at all. Many proponents of the anthropic principle leaned on it further to argue that random chance and the vast pool of possibilities made humans likely to be alone in the world.   Though we know now how wrong they were in such matters, they did correctly predict the tremendous variance in physics that can occur across even mere AUs of higher-dimensional distance in the Bulk hyperspace (as well as the difficulty of constructing a coherent theory of everything in a highly variable multiverse). The great diversity of worlds studied by transhuman science today range in their natures from wildly different forms of gravity to new fundamental forces and even to countless phenomena widely called forms of "magic", tangible and powerful phenomena that yet evade transhuman understanding at the current state of inquiry.   But what allows physics to "vary" from zone to zone of hyperspace? The answer is that the fundamental values of physics - things once assumed to be constant, such as the speed of light - are really variables, whose variation is in turn governed by another set of laws, one that remains to be fully understood but is well studied within the Local Habitable Nexus. The model most widely accepted today to explain this is known as the Nkwere-Alumbra eXtended Standard (NAXS).
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