QUANTUM SUICIDE – NOT YOUR GRANDFATHER’S PARADOX

The quantum suicide thought experiment was first posed by Max Tegmark in 1997, and it goes something like this: Imagine a gun is hooked up to a machine that measures the spin of a quantum particle every time the trigger is pulled.

If the particle is measured as spinning clockwise, the gun will fire; if it’s spinning counter-clockwise, it won’t. A man points the gun at a sandbag and pulls the trigger 10 times.

The gun goes off seemingly at random: “bang-click-bang-bang-bang-click-click-bang-click-click.” Then, the man points the gun at his own head and attempts to pull the trigger 10 more times. What does he hear? “Click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click.​” He could keep on pulling the trigger for eternity, and the gun would never fire. How is that possible?

Now let’s go back in time to the first moment he pointed the gun at his head. He pulls the trigger, and the gun fires. The man is dead.

How can that happen when we already know the gun never fired?

It’s because every time he pulls the trigger, the universe splits into separate timelines: one where the gun fired, one where it didn’t.

When he was shooting the sandbag, he existed in the timelines created by that series of bangs and clicks. But when he aimed the gun at himself, the only timelines he could exist in were the ones where he survived—and thus, the ones where the gun didn’t go off.

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