On December 27th, 1967, Amara Aalto was born at 4:45 a.m. She was born perfectly healthy to a
married couple, Hugh and Lian Aalto. As Amara peered out into the world for the first time,
her parents looked back down at her in awe—a collection of matter, atomic nuclei, building
and decaying into a physical, observable person in the world for the first time.
Just two years after giving birth to Amara, by a stroke of unbelievably good fortune,
Amara’s mother, Lian, sold a majority stake of a business she had been building over the prior
several years. The business had not yet become profitable, but Lian had just recently filed
and been granted two utility patents on her products that suddenly became highly valuable
to the company offering the acquisition deal. Lian took the deal, maintained an
executive role and large stock in the company, and her and Hugh became exceptionally wealthy,
their net worth skyrocketing into the 9 figures over the following years.
Throughout her life, Amara would be contained deeply inside the shelter of this wealth,
her parents being able to pull almost any strings and provide just about anything for her.
Throughout her life, Amara would try a variety of so-called passions and interests and careers,
never really feeling much urgency or risk or responsibility.
In her adult years, she would end up primarily working for her mother’s company. She didn’t
really do much of anything, though, and was sort of always treated as the founder’s daughter, which
she never really had the motivation to change. Amara would marry a man whom her mother introduced
her to at a high-status business gala. She would go on to have four children with him, inherit
and build a large wealth, and she and her husband would inject the same fortune disguised problems
that they had growing up into their kids, the family’s glue made almost entirely of money
and social appearance. Likewise, this was the case for most of Amara’s friend groups, as well.
Throughout her life, despite appearances, she was generally miserable.
When she forty years old, Amara and her husband divorced for a myriad of good reasons.
Amara would grow old and die, never remarrying, living a financially luxurious life that she never
really had to touch. And so, she never really did. On January 3rd, 1968, Amara Aalto was born
at 12:01 a.m. She was born about a week later than expected, but perfectly healthy to a
married couple, Hugh and Lian Aalto. As Amara peered out into the world for the first time,
her parents looked back down at her—a collection of matter, atomic nuclei, building and decaying
into a physical, observable person in the world for the first time.
Just three months after the birth of Amara, in a stroke of terrible misfortune and bad timing,
after feeling under weather and sleeping through an extremely important meeting
that he was supposed to lead, Amara’s father, Hugh,
was fired from his job. Following being fired, he struggled to find work for quite some time,
and Amara’s mother, Lian, who was trying to get a business off the ground and into the black,
was forced to divert her attention away from the business and join Hugh in trying to find
a job with benefits during this volatile time of Amara’s infancy. Lian was able to find one, while
Hugh reoriented his career, but she essentially had to let her business die in the process.
As time went on, Lian and Hugh would restabilize themselves, both working relatively average
full-time office jobs, making enough money to live relatively average, comfortable lives.
They had to keep a somewhat close eye on their spending but always managed
to stay out of any further financial trouble. When Amara was eleven, she decided she wanted
to start playing soccer. Because the age cut off for the different soccer leagues was January 1st,
she was the oldest on her team. Because she was the oldest at an age where months often
looked like years, she was also one of the best. Because she was one of the best, she received
more coaching and playing time, and because she received more focus and time, she got better and
better, this effect further compounding throughout her teens. In her adolescence, she worked
part-time jobs in order to have her own spending money and afford soccer camps and top-of-the-line
soccer equipment, developing strong self-discipline and perseverance along the way.
At twenty-two, she was selected for the United States Women's National Soccer Team, which she
would play on for a long and fruitful career. In her thirties, she met a man whom she fell
deeply in love with, married, and had three children. She enjoyed and took great pride in
her career, family, and life, feeling a great sense of responsibility for her successes.
She would grow old and die having lived a life she found completely rich and meaningful.
On December 27th, 1967, at 4:45 a.m. Hugh Aalto is asleep. Lian Kim is also asleep. The next day,
Hugh wakes up, goes to work, and then returns home to his apartment in the city.
That same day, Lian does the same, returning to her small home in the suburbs, outside the city.
Eight years prior, on June 12th, 1959, Hugh got sick from some food he ate and was bedridden for
nearly the entire weekend. That weekend, Lian happened to be hanging out with some friends
she rarely saw, who also happened to have some mutual friends with Hugh. Hugh’s friends
and Lian and her friends hung out that Saturday, while Hugh watched TV at home.
On December 27th, 1967, Isaac Aalto was born at 2:17 a.m. He was born perfectly healthy to
a married couple, Hugh and Lian Aalto. Nine months prior, while eating at a restaurant,
Hugh and Lian’s waiter accidentally mixed up Hugh’s plate with a plate for a table just two
over from them. It took about eight seconds for Hugh to notice and notify the waiter,
who then took another sixteen seconds to realize what had happened and correct the
mix-up. This then led to a couple other short delays while paying and getting through various
stoplights on the drive home. Once Hugh and Lian got home, they got into bed. Isaac was
conceived that night. He was an only child. On December 27th, 1967, Amara Aalto was born
at 4:45 a.m. She was born perfectly healthy to a married couple, Hugh and Lian Aalto.
Following Amara’s birth, Hugh and Lian’s life would run fairly smoothly,
both working their careers with no major successes, but no major setbacks either.
At age thirty-nine, however, a single cell inside Lian’s body began uncontrollably growing
and dividing. This one cell turned into millions and millions of other abnormal
cells that continued to grow and divide relentlessly. Amara would be just twelve
years old when she lost her mother to cancer. The treatments and efforts toward trying to save
Lian ate through all their savings and left Hugh filing for bankruptcy. He never really
recovered and struggled through relative poverty and mental instability for the remainder of his
life. He and Amara moved to a small apartment in a lower-income neighborhood when Amara was fourteen,
which placed her in a new school system and exposed her to an entirely different life.
Amara would struggle with various substance abuse throughout most of her life,
starting around this time. She married a man who shared such a lifestyle, after having two children
with him. She worked as a bartender in small local bars for her entire life, always loathing herself
and her continuous inability to make something of her life, feeling a deep responsibility for
her inadequacy. Not having much money, substance abuse, and mental instability ran rampant through
her marriage, friendships, and life, until she died at the young age of fifty-five.
On December 6th, 1967, Amara Aalto was born at 3:58 p.m. to a married couple,
Hugh and Lian Aalto. She was not born perfectly healthy. Arriving more than two weeks early,
she was born prematurely, and her body was still exceptionally fragile and many of her organs were
still underdeveloped. The doctor suggested that there was a chance Amara would fully recover, but
also a chance that the premature birth could lead to some mild-to-moderate developmental issues.
Lian and Hugh would go on to live a nice, financially comfortable life,
nothing extreme happening in any direction. At around eight years old, however, Amara began
experiencing her parents’ fear, and she was soon classified as learning disabled, diagnosed with
dyslexia, dysgraphia, and processing impairment. The older Amara got, the more she began to notice
and understand the implications of why she was always treated differently in school. She
realized people thought she was dumb. And the more the school system seemed to press down on her,
tell her she wasn’t working hard enough, was a bad or distracting student, or even ridiculed her,
Amara found it hard not to believe that she was. As she aged through middle school and high school,
though, she began feeling an increasing drive to prove everyone wrong. This mission caused Amara
to put great effort into learning new ways of learning, developing methods of managing her mind,
and modifying and adapting the angles from which she approached ideas and problems.
Slowly, she began to successfully push back. Following high school, despite all odds,
as a result of her phenomenal ACT scores, impressive grade improvement, and unbelievably
moving application essay, Amara was accepted to her first-choice school, University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, where she would enroll in their top-tier undergraduate physics program.
As an effect of her need to overcome her immense learning tribulations, she had, by now,
found highly creative ways of reimagining problems and solutions, seeing and approaching math
equations and theories in profoundly unique and effective ways. She would not only catch up to the
standards of her age, but quickly surpass them. Following her undergraduate graduate degree,
she would go on to earn her Ph.D. in physics at Harvard.
By her forties, Amara had become a well-respected theoretical physicist, specializing in quantum
mechanics, gravity, and cosmology. She became a research professor at Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, wrote and published several popular books, and often appeared on various
media programs as well as science events where she would give talks, interviews, and lectures.
At age forty-six, Amara was giving a talk at a science festival for a slightly more introductory
level audience. After briefly introducing herself and the topics she would be covering,
Amara said to the audience, “You know, my whole childhood,
I was told in all sorts of different ways how dumb I was. And for a while, I believed it.
“The world sets these constraints, lays forth systems and ways of considering ideas and people,
filtering out the world and its talent according to standards and methods.
My life and work have taught me many things, but perhaps one of the most important things, is how
much is not what it seems or what you expect, how much is fragmented from what we accept as true,
rational, or rightfully status quo. Sean Carrol recently said, “If the world is truly quantum
mechanical, we should change our view of what is obvious and what is surprising.”
“My focus over the last several years, as some of you may know, has been researching
and interpreting the wave function and its measurement in quantum mechanics. I am, as some of
you probably also know, a very vocal proponent of a theory known as the many-worlds interpretation.
And there aren’t many other contemporary theories that require such a relinquishment
of your intuitions as this one. For those of you who don’t know, the many worlds interpretation
basically argues that an essential function in quantum mechanics known as the wavefunction is
objectively real, and the strange randomness of a particle’s superposition, or indeterminate state,
coming into an inexplicable definitive state when it is measured, is explained by the fact
that all possible outcomes of the measurement are actually physically realized into other "worlds"
or universes that split at the moment of the particle interacting, or becoming entangled,
with some component of its environment. In this case, a measurer. In other words,
basically every time a quantum system becomes entangled with its environment and decoheres, the
world splits off into different, parallel worlds with it. And so, each time we, ourselves, become
entangled with one of these systems decohering, which are constantly happening inside of each of
us, every second atomic nuclei building and decaying in our bodies and interacting
with the observable environment, a new different version of us goes with it into a different world.
We, of course, never know or experience this, for the potentially infinite worlds and their
differing outcomes and possibilities are always experienced by us, in any version,
as one. One single possible way. But there are potentially near-infinite other ways, other what
ifs asked and answered differently, not only possible, but very real, happening in parallel.
“And so, I also believe that it is more than likely that there are many, many other different
Amaras existing right now. I will never know how things could’ve gone or are going for any of them.
But I do know this: each one of us has a world with conditions,
and each one of us has their own conditions within that world. Some work out, some don’t.
But you can almost never know which it’s going to be, and why. Our advantages sometimes turn out
to be our disadvantages, and our disadvantages sometimes turn out to be our advantages.
My so-called learning disability, the thing I dreaded for the entire first half of my life, was
not an obstacle I had to overcome, it is precisely The reason why I am up here. Life is a game of
arbitrary odds. Whatever success we have or don’t, whatever person we become or don’t, the reasons
for everything are concealed within the odds. For most of my life, it was as if I existed in
another world that could not communicate with this one. Now I teach about the likelihood
that this is actually true for us all. Trust me, the odds work in mysterious ways.”
“Alright, that’s my little introductory spiel. Now, let’s actually get into some theory.”