101 YEARS OLD AND STILL IN A UNIVERSE OF HIS OWN...

PONDERING how best to honour the memory of Stephen Hawking, I briefly considered looking for the Theory Of Everything which had eluded him but felt it unlikely I’d find something he had spent his whole life unsuccessfully looking for. I have therefore decided to seek a simpler but also worthy goal: a Theory Of Everything That Goes Wrong.

I wrote a few weeks ago about my Parallel Universe Theory Of Losing Things. I so often lose something, look everywhere for it, then find it right in front of me in a place I had already searched several times before, that the only possible explanation is that I have slipped between parallel universes.

The item is in front of me in one universe but not in the other. So it seems to dodge me then reappear in full view as I jump between universes.

Other things that go wrong can be explained in similar ways. Why does my evening train home always arrive at the platform where my seat is furthest from the station exit? Why does my 9.25 morning bus to the station always leave on time if I arrive at the stop at 9.25-and-a-half, but get there 10 minutes late if I arrive at 9.24-and-ahalf? Why do my jackets and trousers not match? Why has the supermarket run out of the one ingredient I specifically go there to buy?

In Voltaire’s Candide, Dr Pangloss argued that this was the best of all possible worlds but that was before quantum theory brought the idea of parallel universes into consideration. All of a sudden we were forced to entertain the possibility of particles being in two different places at the same time and a cat being both dead and alive simultaneously.

Parallel universes offered a way out of the problem: the quantum particle is in one place in one universe and the other place in a parallel version. And each of those universes spawns two more universes, one with a live cat and the other with a dead one. It’s not so much that we don’t know where the particle is or whether the cat is dead of alive it’s just that we don’t now which universe we’re in until we look at the particle and examine the cat.

So when I’m at the front of a train, hoping it will come in to Platform 1 when I’ll be perfectly placed for the exit, but someone else, who normally suffers the same problem, is at the back of the train, which is ideal for Platform 4, the train clearly splits into two universes, dumping both of us in the worst of all possible places.

It’s all probably something to do with entropy, which maximises the amount of disorder in the universe. My Theory Of Everything That Goes Wrong, will have a similar principle ensuring that it goes as wrong as possible for all of us.

So when Dr Schrödinger faces the problem of whether to buy cat food because he doesn’t know if the cat is dead or alive, he can rest assured that he will get it wrong whatever he does.

But it doesn‘t matter because if the cat is alive the supermarket will have run out of cat food anyway. All that’s left to work out is the question of how Donald Trump was elected but that one, I fear, would even have been beyond Prof. Hawking.