"Well, it's the same world, sort of, it's just -- look," Jamie says, fidgeting a little, "I'm going to make a botch of this, I've told you I'm no good at it."
Helen tried to explain it to him often enough. How would Helen have explained it?
"It's like -- you know how people say, 'well, what if I hadn't kicked that football off the field through the neighbor's window, I might've won that match and everything would've been different?' So say there's a world where you did win that match and a world where you didn't, and whenever you kick a football there's both at once. Well, that's a stupid example, you'll say, probably kicking the football doesn't change anything much."
He shrugs. "But then it goes back and back -- say to the first caveman who kicked a rock. And then there's a split, so you get a world where that caveman won his big caveman match, and went on to be sports king of the cavemen, and a world where he kicked it into his neighbor's cave and stayed a sort of rubbishy caveman all his life. And down and down the line, the world where the caveman became sports king is the one where, I don't know, everyone's sports-mad and gathers around watch gladiator football matches to the death, and in the one where he stayed rubbishy it's something totally different. And it's all like that -- and there's hundreds and thousands and millions of them."
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Helen tried to explain it to him often enough. How would Helen have explained it?
"It's like -- you know how people say, 'well, what if I hadn't kicked that football off the field through the neighbor's window, I might've won that match and everything would've been different?' So say there's a world where you did win that match and a world where you didn't, and whenever you kick a football there's both at once. Well, that's a stupid example, you'll say, probably kicking the football doesn't change anything much."
He shrugs. "But then it goes back and back -- say to the first caveman who kicked a rock. And then there's a split, so you get a world where that caveman won his big caveman match, and went on to be sports king of the cavemen, and a world where he kicked it into his neighbor's cave and stayed a sort of rubbishy caveman all his life. And down and down the line, the world where the caveman became sports king is the one where, I don't know, everyone's sports-mad and gathers around watch gladiator football matches to the death, and in the one where he stayed rubbishy it's something totally different. And it's all like that -- and there's hundreds and thousands and millions of them."