Quantum suicide and quantum immortality in fiction

Authors of science fiction have used themes involving both quantum suicide and immortality. The basic idea is that a person who dies on one world may survive in another world or parallel universe.

Quantum suicide Edit

Quantum suicide themes have been explored in the following works:

• Larry Niven's short story "All the Myriad Ways", collected in a collection of the same name (1971)
• Dan Simmons's novel The Hollow Man (1992). Simmons also describes a quantum execution mechanism in his Hyperion Cantos series.
• Greg Egan's novel Quarantine (1992)
• Greg Egan's novel Permutation City (1994), in which one character repeatedly had his mind uploaded and his copy eventually terminated, but found out that he always "ended up" in another world, where his survival was explained by increasingly improbable circumstances.
• Robert Charles Wilson's short story Divided by Infinity (1998)
• Denis Johnson's novel Already Dead (A California Gothic) (1998)
• Jason Shiga's book Meanwhile (2004)
• Greg Bear's short Story "Schrodinger's Plague" found in his book Tangents deals with a doomsday version of this experiment in which instead of a single scientist dying, a deadly virus is released into the populace.

Quantum immortality Edit

Quantum immortality themes have been explored in several works:

BooksEdit

• The Greg Egan novel Quarantine explores topics related to quantum immortality.
• In the Greg Egan short story The Infinite Assassin, the title character explicitly defines himself this way: "'I' am those who survive, and succeed. The rest are someone else."
• Other science fiction stories exploring these and related ideas include All the Myriad Ways by Larry Niven, and Divided by Infinity by Robert Charles Wilson.
• Terry Pratchett's short story Death and What Comes Next has a philosopher arguing the principle with Death, who has come for him.
• Steven Hall's novel The Raw Shark Texts contains references to Max Tegmark and the Quantum Machine Gun (an alternate name for the quantum suicide thought experiment) suggesting a possible quantum immortality -related reading of the story.
• In Neal Stephenson's 2008 novel Anathem, the concept of quantum immortality factors significantly, if under different names.

TV and filmEdit

• The episode Perfect Circles in the third season of Six Feet Under contains references and allusions to quantum immortality, as a major character observes several possible outcomes of his life.
• In David Lindsay-Abaire's play Rabbit Hole, a grieving mother takes solace in the possibility that her dead son may enjoy quantum immortality. She comes to prefer to believe that this world in which she lives may simply be a "sadder version" of other co-existing, parallel universes. Rabbit Hole won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
• In The Prestige, Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) repeatedly duplicates himself and kills his previous copy; his continued belief in the survival of his consciousness in the new (living) copy mirrors the principles of quantum immortality without utilizing parallel universes.

Video gamesEdit

• In the video game Alan Wake (Remedy Entertainment, 2010), an in-game TV series called "Night Springs" has a demonstration of quantum immortality, in which a scientist demonstrates that a gun he is holding can't fire. However, the device used to maintain this quantum immortality is accidentally unplugged and the scientist dies.