On Thu, 18 Nov 1999 Edd111@aol.com wrote:
> If so, does that mean that the entire Universe in that initial
> reality also never happened?
Quantum mechanics teaches us that reality isn't.
Electrons are both particle and wave, or neither, depending on how one looks at it. There's no reason to assume that "reality" is any more real than that.
> I always get bogged down with alternate reality stories in that
> Cramer, and others seem to me to imply that only the local reality
> (viz, the earth, perhaps the solar system) is forever changed.
> Well, then, what happens to the rest of the universe??
"rest of the universe" is the space-time area that falls outside of the light cone of the event. Relativity tells us that the event is irrelevant to those space-time points since information cannot travel faster than light.
The picture only changes when you bring into play the quantum-scale time hysteresis loops that some physisists are currently theoreticising about...
Rik
-- The Internet is not a network of computers. It is a network of people. That is its real strength.