Mandela Effect: Timeline Change vs Parallel Universe

Mandela Effect: Timeline Change v Parallel Universe

By Peter Wolfe

One of the big contentions of the ME is whether the observed differences are the result of a change in one timeline or as the result of a Quantum Universe shift. Both could yield the observed effects but there are some huge differences to consider. The first Law of ME, if you will, is multiple timelines and discrete universes must remain consistent with in themselves. For example one cannot merely say “internal combustion engines in MY timeline/parallel reality do not and never had cylinder heads.” One would have to explain how the engine worked under those geometrics or be disregarded as a person who doesn’t understand how engines work.

The Second Law of ME is that there is only one timeline in a universe at a time. It is the one you are in right now. How you got to this timeline is a matter of conjecture as well for all things you remember. Once you land in this timeline the one you came from no longer exists. Jumping from one timeline to another and back would be impossible since while you were absent from the “old” one it would have proceeded without you and would be a different one than you left. Indeed, “you can never go home again.”

The “Non-superposition Corollary” of the 2^nd Law asserts: when someone or something alters the timeline those changes will propagate forward in time making a range of alterations from negligible to massive. Similarly, most people will never notice. Again it is like turning left or turning right at an intersection, only one can ever be.

The Third Law of ME says when parallel or quantum universes intersect and a person transits the passage he/she places him/her self in the same universe as another version of him/her self. Since you would likely have a mostly same history, look around to find yourself and say hello. Ask questions to see how your life might have been. If the people around you when you arrive mostly recognize you the parallel world of your life will necessarily be very similar. On the other hand, if nobody recognizes you, you or haven’t seen you in a very long time the two of you lead vastly different lives. If they say, “I thought you died back in {some previous year},” feel happy you are more fortunate than the version of you who died.” It is probably NOT a good idea to pursue interrogation too far so as to not bum you out. Dying as a war hero might make you feel good, but if they say “auto-erotic asphyxiation” it could creep you out entirely.

The Fifth Law of the ME is what you see is the tip of the iceberg. While you are quibbling over the spelling of Febreze you might miss the point that Febreze never existed at all. It only ever existed in your memory. You might also miss that Al Gore was President for 26 months before something flipped the timeline and we got 8 years of George W., 9/11, two wars and a massive financial collapse instead. Whether you count that as good or bad is immaterial since nobody now remembers how the Gore Administration handled global affairs.

Mandela Effect: Simple to Exotic

Explanations for what the Mandela Effect is ranges from simple to exotic. At its simplest it is faulty memory experience by a relatively few individuals. For example one can count the number of people who assert that in their childhood Froot Loops was actually Fruit Loops in the hundreds to maybe a few thousand people. Statistically the number must be exceedingly small compared to the set of everyone who ever saw a box of the cereal. A few people go as far as claiming the box art changed recently and sometimes even as they watched it happen. While the claims of Fruit being the spelling and people claiming to have seen it in the store, nobody seems to have thought to buy the box and keep it as proof of their experience.

There are many other spelling, logo and grammar and punctuation examples to give, but they all lead to the exact same place: Either something changed the past or the claimants are self-reporting their memory fault. Memory faults are not necessarily a disability or critical malfunction. The way humans store memory is fraught with the opportunity to infill missing pieces and for personal preference to color what the memory consists of.

In some instances a memory trace is colored with an agenda that must be maintained. Such is the discrepancy in the size of the Presidential Limo of the JFK Assassination on November 22, 1963. The claimants of a 4-seat limo neglect the presence of Mrs. Connally. She necessarily must have been elsewhere if the limo did not have 6 seats. To account for that missing personage, the 4-seat claimants must infill their memories with alleged evidence that she indeed was elsewhere for some good reason. There are several alleged images of a 4-seat limo, but at critical review the photo fails to substantiate the 4-seat claim.

JFJ Limo at the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit
used by permission from Robert Carlson

The following picture is purportedly shown a 4-seat limo but still shows the partition between the driver row and the middle row where Gov. Connally is sitting. Notice the missing steering wheel and driver if this is a 4-seat limo.

This photo is a non-evidentiary photo shot to accompany the magazine article. Notice the wilted flowers to suggest this is the limo but the total lack of blood splatter anywhere in the back seat.

These three photos suggest nothing of the Mandela Effect in this matter. Maybe some evidence still persists, but we have not yet seen any of it.

Timeline Alterations

A few people have become convinced that they are from an alternate timeline. They have slid into this reality from one where what they remember is what actually was the conditions and events of their earlier lives. They arrive here with a snapshot recollection of how it was in their world, but cannot fit it into a cohesive cause and effect timeline the remainder of us experience.

Some of them have visual memories of Australia being 1,000 miles further south. Some of them claim for them South America was 1,000 miles further west than it is in the reality most of us have ever known. While they have a strong emotional connection with their recollections of South America they all fail to mention that 1,000 miles would also have shifted the internationally recognized time zone layout of South America.

Every single mention of alternate continental placement on the globe can be attributed to flat map projection differences. How is it that a person can believe they came from an alternate Earth over the idea the cartographer was not very accurate? Just for the Flat Earth readers of this Post: If the Earth were indeed flat, the map makers would not have had to resort to so many different projections. One would do.

Earth Two

A couple of the followers of Mandela Effect strangeness have also cited the massive relocation of Earth from the Sagittarius Arm to the Orion Spur as an explanation for why they remember facts and figures which are otherwise dubious and not recognized by their peers. Whether the Earth and solar system was moved or whether it was replicated 10,000 light-years away is not germane. Somebody would have had to go to extreme limits to accomplish such a task to benefit “such poor little lambs as we.”

The assertion is the New Earth is not quite the same as the Old Earth. They make a few errors in their pre-move survey. Some people remember Old Earth while those who are now awake see the New Earth for what it is. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy discusses the summary destruction of Earth to make way for an Inter-galactic super highway. Afterwards the Galactic council must rebuild the Earth and repopulate with those people who were unjustly destroyed. They decide to make it a better place than before, somewhat like a Disneyland perfection.

I’d say the construction crew did not go nearly far enough to fix the ills of the Old Earth. I expect more than a return to “normal.”

Simulated Reality

I like the concept that we live in a simulated reality. If that is true then there is no “higher” level to go. We are just subroutines running in some supermassive computing system. Frank J. Tipler wrote about such a future of mankind in his book, The Physics of Immortality. At some point in the future we will be able to resurrect every person who ever was, including those who died as infants, or never really existed because the egg was not fertilized and carried to term. We would necessarily do that in a cyber environment due to the limitations of universe energy to support all the flesh and blood bodies. But then it would make no difference. If we are conscious beings with a real or imagined Free Will being “real” or simulated would be no different.

Issac Azimov posited the problem of Entropy in the short story, The Last Question. In that story all the stars were burning down and at some point there would be zero energy to power the continuation of mankind’s’ consciousness in the simulated world to which we were forced to move.

The Real Simulation

All science fiction aside and all conspiracy theories dispelled, we do exist in a simulated universe. Ponder this: We do not actually see a tree in the forest or a building on the street. What we see is only the light waves reflecting off their surfaces. That patterning of light is ALREADY A SIMULATION. Your entire eye is smaller than a chicken egg. The light sensitive surface inside is about the size of your thumbnail. It being so small doesn’t stop you from seeing the panorama of the Grand Canyon. The image on the thumbnail sized retina is actually upside-down. It is physically inside your skull (whether or not you believe our skeletons changed to add boney parts behind the eyes). You see it as though it was “out there”. Several miles of horizon image fits on the retina and in your head. Then later your brain can “resimulate” it again as you dream about seeing the Grand Canyon. Quite an amazing simulation if I do say. Each and every conscious mind is its own computer processing a shared database of “reality.”

Sounds work the same way.

The Takeaway

Everyone can have fun imagining what causes the phenomenon of memory not matching the current reality. Just don’t take it all too seriously or you may be relegated to the ranks of the goofy and eccentric.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio

Keep pondering and speculating, the answers to your questions may yet to be revealed.

Are ME Observations Just a Glitch in The Matrix

A number of people believe that ME evidence is related to glitches in The Matrix. The Matrix being a computer simulation is the most prevalent suggestion for what it is.

This simulation supposes a computer and memory medium which they cannot see or experience. The simulation also requires coders and someone to build it. We can speculate widely on if they are reptilian aliens, the illuminati, satan and his minions, our future selves or someone else entirely.

This simulated human life in a simulated environment begs this most important question: Where are you really and what exactly are you? Following this question is if you get out of this Matrix, would you like what you find?

The Mandela Effect: Real or Imagined

Because it is an observed phenomenon one cannot declare it doesn't exist. Therefore, it can be both real AND imagined. At lease WHAT it is can be imagined. Perusing the blogs, Facebook pages and Youtube vids there are a myriad range of mundane to fantastical explanations for the experience.

On the mundane end of the spectrum there is the idea that some people misremember a fact or event and find dozens to hundreds of other people who similarly misremember it and they share their experiences in internet forums. As such, the Internet facilitates a filter-effect to bring together these people.

On the opposite extreme, there is the hypothesis we are now living in a virtual simulation after the Earth has been destroyed in some unspecified calamity such as an asteroid strike or alien invasion. Taking this idea to the extreme extreme, maybe our entire existence has never been anything but a simulation. In that case, there is no There out there to go back to and we ought to get used to being a simulation.

Along the continuum of possible causes of the Mandela Effect there are explanations of varying complexity. Below are a few of those possibilities.

Different time-lines of cause and effect are colliding due to natural aging of the Universe. Fruit Loops and Froot Loops, Berenstain and Berenstein, Sex in the City and Sex and the City, et al. each exist in their respective time-lines and are now confusing us here in this time-line. I suppose the people in the other time-line are equally confounded by their disparities.

Going a bit further afield, the Mandela Effect may be the result of entire QuantumUniverses merging long enough for a few people to get trapped on the wrong side of the membrane. They remember their history and tell us about it. In their version, South America is farther to the west than it is here. Australia had another land mass off its western shore although no one has come up with its name yet.

Some people suggest that the effect is man-made and possibly due to the activities at the CERN facilities on the French-Swiss border. The CERN high-energy experiments are hypothesized to be opening alternate dimensions, merging time-lines and messing with the past. Calls to shut down the plant fall of deaf ears even as more examples of the Mandela Effect are catalogs and debated ad naseum.

If the alterations of our past is the real cause of the Effect and that cause is natural, we can only get used to it happening.

If it is a man-made Effect (possibly by the activities at CERN) we can likewise not stop the changes from happening. The suggested impacts of the CERN experiments ripple across time and universe membranes. We would have to stop the CERN lab in every universe and in all time in order to eradicate it. Just the mere suggestion of stopping CERN in all Universes creates more Universes where it must be stopped. Since today's CERN activities alter our past so would future CERN activities (both here and in all Universes.) Oddly, even past CERN activity can still alter out past as well as our future.

Sadly, if we all have been relocated to the Sagittarius arm of the Milky Way from the Orion arm by some superior civilization, there is no going back. Planet Krypton exploded and Kal-El cannot go home without traveling back it time to a point before it went boom.

If you wake up in a different Universe or time-line, you best get used to your new life because unless you are Jim Belucci in Mr. Destiny, George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life or Jack Campbell in Family Man, when you see the alternate life you don't get to go back.

Actual Changes to the Past

Actual changes to the past is a far more difficult concept to wrap ones head around than is the idea that alternate pasts already exist and only some of us have a recollection of them. Both concepts require an agent of causation which today is not widely accepted by the scientific community nor the totality of people who assert they are the beneficiaries of selective knowledge.

For some people the explanation for differing memories is that they themselves appeared in this reality from a different timeline. While this is a lofty and romantic notion, precisely how many ME examples did it take to bring them to that conclusion? Is it a preponderance of examples that helped form their conclusion or is it a feeling that it must be so? A lot of people assert they remember the ME namesake, Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s but when pressed for any details such as the date, they are absent an answer.

The opposite condition is also an explanation. In that variation, in is not the observer who made the transitions between realities but the events themselves. To those observers the alternate events and conditions are only represented in their memories but not in any remaining physical artifacts.

This brings us to the variation where a single coherent past is actually modified by some (as yet) unspecified agent of causation. The LHC at CERN is one alleged cause. A superior alien civilization is another. Our future selves as time travelers are also suspect. Even ancient earthly civilizations residing inside a hollow earth are hypothesized as the instigators. Lastly, mere quantum perturbation might result in a spontaneous modification of what was originally manifest and some people escaped knowing about the change.

"My biggest smack in the side of the head was digging out my old copy of Springsteen's Born in the USA to see that it indeed is now a red visor cap in his pocket not his signature red bandanna."

Realizing that all matter is really energy waves until an observer observes them makes the next explanation plausible. Every two (or more) waves which interact with each other encode their own natures in each other. Waves move in the three ordinal directions (x,y,z) and one of time (present into the future). Waves also move in the negative ordinal directions. There is nothing to stop them from moving in a negative time direction also.

How far back they have an impact has never been fully explored, although physicists know waves do this. They also know future events help determine the causative events which made the future what it is (will be.)  ME experiences may be a manifestation of backward traveling Event Waves which mix with the "immutable past" and alter it in small, medium and large ways. We only see the changes to things which we have recent memories of with to compare. for example we can discuss the apparent changes of a word in the Bible because we have a Bible to go look it up in. But in a Retroactive Event Modification wave removed an entire chapter from the bible, we could only speculate on its name and what it said. We might go looking at the list of "Lost Books" of the Bible that were proposed but never approved as possible candidates.

So now at this point in time each person must choose his/her own explanation for what they believe.

Mass Brainwashing

Mass Brainwashing

People who clearly recall some little detail in popular culture differently than can be seen by looking at "evidence" have come up with a spectrum of causes ranging from "I just always thought..." to we are all living in a simulation controlled by superior beings, are being manipulated in everything we see, hear and do while the Mandela Effect are glitches in the matrix we are not supposed to notice but do. To some people the superior ones are the Illuminati while for others it is lizard people from Saturn or Nibiru. Another popular explanation is time travelers who are having a go at us with silly bugger changes.

The alterations of popular culture is the possible way to make anyone aware of the changes being made. In a nutshell, most ordinary people are not known by a sufficient number of other outspoken people for it to ever be known they used to have 6 fingers on each hand but somehow now it's only five. Without photographs there would only be a few people who ever knew.

On the other hand, Bart Simpson is far more real in popular culture than most actual human beings. Millions of people have seen him and know of his antics. They know how many fingers he has on each hand. Five, right? Oh, no, now it is only four. And its every character from the very first show.  His signature saying, "don't have cows, dude," would be remembered by most of them. At least the ones who watched from the early days before he stopped saying it."

The idea that a powerful alien civilization has made this simulated world just for us is more than a little bit Christian in its formation. Very Biblical. Genesis to be exact. Even the one god of genesis say WE when they refer to themselves and the making of the world in six days.

Another suggestion is we were all "natural" flesh and blood creatures until the end of the Mayan Calendar in December 2012 when its end signified that something catastrophic "might have happened" and we all were resurrected in this simulated world. ME and déjà vu are glitches in the software. What was so special about humanity that it warranted being recreated in a cyber world that is exactly as flawed as the old one was? The architects of this simulation decided that all 7 billion people needed to be preserved even though they will appear to suffer and die of environmental and manufactured causes. Or are all those "others" just non-conscious props for the benefit of we who are sentient and conscious as in "Breakfast of Champions?" That is a dangerous supposition that will allow us to minimalize the plight of those others.

This brings us to the concept of us all being brainwashed into thinking we are more than we are and need all the stuf (or stuff) that is being sold. Exactly to what end are we being enslaved by the brainwashing? Automation is making human labor obsolete. Soon there will be few if any people working. Everyone will be given their "daily bread" by the masters just for standing around being submissive. Again very Biblical.

The whole idea of a massive slave population is a bad one at best. Consider 7 billion people all wanting the attention of the Master, dependent for everything. This is why parents expect their children will eventually grow up and move away and many times kick them out after 18 to 20 years and told to get a job.

Next up: Actual Changes of the Past

Three Phases of ME

Thousands of people have the sense that something in their past has changed and only a few other people have any sense of it happening. The phenomenon has been labeled "Mandela Effect" by Fiona Broome.  To them the question becomes: did something alter mine and many other peoples' memories or did the Past actually change. For them there is only those two possibilities.

A third explanation emerges which is equally able to describe and explain the experiences people have with respect to the Effect. Briefly the Mandela Effect is a memory fluke which is derived from the reports that when Nelson died on December 5, 2013, Houghton Estate, Johannesburg, South Africa (Wikipedia) people surfaced who said they thought he had died in prison many years earlier. To them Mr. Mandela never was the President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999 and the man who presided over the dismantling of the Apartheid government. While they "clearly remember" him dying in prison, they have no idea who was the President during the years 1994-1999 in South Africa. Basically, they were not paying close enough attention to African politics at the time.

This third explanations requires a large communication portal wherein large numbers of people can read what others say and post their own responses to either agree with or disagree with what is said. The Internets create this great filter through which the information flows. Many hundreds if not thousands of participants add their part to the collective recollections. Without the ability to communicate with large numbers of people who appear to have the same recollection there could be no body of knowledge we now call the Mandela Effect. Each person would casually dismiss their own recall as being faulty with no corroboration from others to validate the error of that memory.

Now that the phenomenon has a name, multiple Youtube channels and a presence on Facebook and Twitter, many more people are able to validate their faulty memories.  The erroneous memories seem to only manifest in pairs. It was THIS way or it was THAT way as in Berenstain and Berenstein Bears, or Fruit Loops vs Froot Loops. In this manner the cause in not likely a merging of quantum realities since many other permutations of the alternate spellings of word choices would have equally probable presence. We should see many different appearances.

Should some time traveling adventurer return to our past and make changes, he or she would be wasting massive amounts of high-energy resources to Punk us here in the early 21st century. Adding a dividing line in the VW logo, a curly F in the Ford logo or the "male arrow" to the other circular Volvo logo, would be playing silly buggers with us here for no apparent reason.

The ability to aggregate opinion via a massive telecomm system facilitates the Mandela Effect. Cartographers have from time to time emphasized and deemphasized the presentation of the spherical planet onto a flat piece of paper. Until an accurate time piece was made which remained accurate during turbulent sea voyages, longitude was a "best guess" by the navigators who were on the exploratory trips around the globe. As their skill improved as well as the accuracy of their clocks, so were their maps.

Ship's Captains commissioned by Kings were not adverse to stretch the extents of their travels with deceptive maps. After all there was no one to challenge their veracity. Recall that Christopher Columbus was not looking for two new continents but a westward route to the India and China. Imagine Queen Isabelle and King Ferdinand saying," But I always thought the world was flat and resting of the back or a turtle. Something must have changed."

So now is it that the person feeling the Mandela Effect is merely being wrong or did someone tamper with his brain?  Next up: Mass brainwashing.