By Anna Kushnir

I am embarrassed to admit that I have never watched PBS’s (no, not phosphate buffered saline, I mean the other one) award-winning and popular science series, NOVA. This will certainly change after last night.

I had the pleasure of attending a sneak preview of NOVA’s new feature, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, at the Museum of Science. The movie follows Mark Oliver Everett (the talented lead singer of the indie rock band, the EELS)as he journeys to learn more about his father, Hugh Everett III, a brilliant, but emotionally distant quantum physicist who laid the foundation for the Parallel Worlds theory, which states that “every event that could occur in a number of ways… trigger[ing] a split that generates multiple universes, which collectively contain every possible outcome.” (from the NOVA website).

This theory served (and continues to serve) as fodder for multiple episodes of Star Trek and the Golden Compass series by Philip Pullman, among others, in which people attempted to gain access or were thrown into lives closely mimicking their own, but not quite – entire worlds that existed alongside theirs, differing only by one decision. The 50th anniversary of this theory as placed on a 2007 cover of Nature.

As shown in the movie, one of the most famous experiments in quantum mechanics, and the foundation for the Parallel Worlds theory, is the Two Slit Experiment. In this experiment, a focused laser beam – consisting of single photons of the same wavelength – is aimed at a board with two teeny slits, positioned in front of an ultra sensitive camera. The camera records the places behind the board where the photons hit. The Two Slit Experiment demonstrated that a particle can be in two different places at the same time (I am afraid to give any more detail for fear of getting something wrong).

Everett proposed that if two particles can be at the same place at the same time, then so can people, since they are just big collections of particles. Everett’s theory ran directly against the teachings of the physics luminary, Niels Bohr. Bohr refused to acknowledge Everett’s theory and it remained dormant and forgotten until recently, when further work in quantum mechanics gave it serious consideration.

Max Tegmark, an MIT cosmologist and quantum physicist featured in the movie, was on hand at the Museum of Science to answer questions about the science in the movie. He spoke eloquently about physics and answered questions in a fluent and understandable (even to me, a biologist with a B- in college physics) fashion. He also expressed his admiration for Everett and his work, saying that to him, the Parallel Worlds theory is one of the most important scientific advances in recent history.

And that’s when I started to get a little frustrated. The Parallel Worlds theory is not one that can be easily tested, if at all. The experimental scientist in me reared up in protest. I could have really used a Western blot, or some FACS data as a very last resort, to show some support for the theory above and beyond inaccessible mathematical calculations and manipulations. Biologists are, in turns out, a very different breed of scientist than ones profiled in Parallel Lives, Parallel Worlds. Different, but no less interesting.

Read more about the Parallel Worlds theory here and watch Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives on PBS starting on Tuesday, Oct 21. If I found a movie about physics interesting, so will you.