You are not a fragment waiting for reality to arrive—you are the field in which reality appears. In 1957 Hugh Everett wrote his famous “Relative State” paper, introducing the idea of the universal wave function. One wave function, evolving unitarily, describing everything. That wave function is what we call the Eternal Now. You are the Eternal Now. Everything is the Eternal Now.
One Wave Function, Many Views
Everett gave us the bold vision: one universal ψ, no collapse in the math, only continuous evolution under Schrödinger’s equation. His advisor John Wheeler softened the picture, reminding us that although the universal wave function exists, the useful work happens in subsystems where knobs can be turned and outcomes recorded. And today, communicators like Sean Carroll assure us there is no contradiction here: one universal ψ is the foundation, and what we call “our lab” or “our wedding” is just a subsystem.
In practice—even in high school classrooms—when two electrons are drawn on the board, there is never a pair of separate wave functions. There is one joint state. That’s orthodoxy. And it matters, because in our classroom there is not a wave function for you, for the dollar bill, or for the table. There is only one shared state. When the wave function collapses, we all see the same outcome together.
The Money Lab
Here’s what you will see. On the table is six dollars. That is the collapse outcome, the Eternal Now. In our framework, the Immutable Past—the Actual—supplies five. Expectation comes from the denominator, built from predictor and idea:
Reality is the dimensionless ratio:
And your subjective felt experience is the natural log:
Why It Matters
Six dollars is what you see on the table. Five is Actual, beyond observation. Eight is the magnitude of your expectation. Reality = 5/8 is not vague—it is exact, unitless, and shared. And yet, though the collapse at six is the same for everyone, each of you carries a different denominator because each of you is coupled to different ideas. Your I varies, so your felt experience varies.
Lecture Transcript:
Lecture Script
“Back in 1957, Hugh Everett wrote a paper called The Relative State Formulation. He was the first to really use the phrase universal wave function. Everett’s claim was bold: there is only one wave function, describing everything. It doesn’t collapse; it just evolves unitarily under the Schrödinger equation. That’s the clean math picture.
Now, Everett’s advisor, John Wheeler, agreed in principle—but he also recognized the limits. Wheeler said: yes, the universal wave function exists, but if we want to do any useful work, we have to carve out subsystems. We need knobs we can actually turn and measurements we can actually make. That’s why, when your physics teacher draws two electrons on the board, he doesn’t draw two separate wave functions—he draws one joint state. It’s always one wave function, but we zoom in on a manageable piece.
Fast forward to today, and people like Sean Carroll have become wonderful communicators of this. Carroll will tell you: there is no contradiction here. One universal wave function is the foundation, and what we call ‘our world’ or ‘our lab experiment’ is just a subsystem—one branch in that universal state.
Now let’s bring this into our own lab. We don’t have a separate wave function for you, for me, for the table, or for the dollars. We are all part of one shared state. When the wave function collapses, we all see the same outcome together. In our case, what do we see on the table? Six dollars. That’s the collapse outcome, the Eternal Now. But in our framework we distinguish this from the Immutable Past, the Actual, which is five dollars. The expectation, built from the wave function’s predictor at six and the idea term at 5.29, gives us eight. So the ratio we call reality is five over eight, or 0.625.
So, just like Everett gave us the universal wave function, Wheeler reminded us to work with subsystems, and Carroll shows us how to communicate that clearly—here, we take the universal wave function seriously, but we also collapse it into something useful we can actually see, measure, and calculate. That’s how we bridge physics and philosophy. The chalkboard shows the collapse; the mythos reminds us of the Actual beyond it.”
That is why twenty-four students can attend the same wedding and leave with twenty-four different stories. One wave function. One shared collapse. Many different felt realities.
From Logos to Mythos
Orthodoxy keeps the scaffolding straight: delta-like collapse at six, area normalized to one, momentum spread wide. Mythos gives us the meaning: six belongs to the Eternal Now, five to the Immutable Past, and the ratio between them produces the felt experience of surprise. This is why the Eternal Now is not an excuse to be vague; it is the place where your rigor lives.
Everett gave us the universal wave function. Wheeler reminded us to work in subsystems. Carroll shows us how to speak of both without contradiction. And in this class, you’ll see how that foundation lets you move from physics to philosophy to theology, with precision and depth.
Lecture Part 2 Transcript
“Why are we even talking about this? Am I making you do math and physics just to make your life painful? No. The reason is this: when you leave here—whether you become a therapist, a theologian, an advisor, or a writer—you’ll need a rigorous foundation under your practice. This equation gives you that.
Look at our money lab. On the table you see six dollars. That’s the collapse outcome, the Eternal Now. But your reality is not six. It’s the ratio of Actual to Expectation: five over eight. That’s 0.625. And when we take the natural log of that, we get your subjective felt experience—exact, quantifiable, not vague.
Now imagine if it were six over six. That’s one. And the natural log of one is zero. Zero surprise. You’ve felt that before—your body knows what it is to feel no surprise. That’s why we call this the subjective felt experience. It’s embodied.
Notice something powerful here: all of you see the same six dollars. You share the same collapse. But none of you feel the same thing about it. Why? Because although your predictor is identical, your imaginary components differ. That’s the ideas you’re coupled with, the unique ideation you carry. Each denominator is different, so each reality ratio is different, and each felt experience is different.
That’s why, if we all attend the same wedding this weekend, we don’t all leave with the same story. We shared one wave function, one event, one subsystem—but your expectations differ, so your realities differ, so your felt experiences differ. Everett is right: everything is interconnected, one wave function. Wheeler is right: it’s only useful when we zoom into a subsystem we can calculate. And you are right to notice: the power of this isn’t in the physics alone, it’s in the precision it gives you to talk about your own lived experience.
That’s why this matters. You can leave here and apply this rigor not only to mathematics, but to therapy sessions, to theology, to philosophy, to your own life. You can talk about surprise, expectation, and reality in a way that is both exact and profound.”