Hacker News Reader

Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I once encountered a doppelgänger of my own when I was 19.

Dude showed up at a youth group I spent a lot of time with. He dressed and looked very much like me, it was totally unnerving. I was surprised how unsettled by it I was.

We never spoke. People asked us about it (well I assume they asked him too) and I would say indecisive stuff like “yeah it is weird” and change the subject.

I think we both understood that it was just too weird and if we were even more alike, or one was better than the other… better to not know.

Sometimes I wonder if he was me in the future, a time traveler.

View on HN

When I was 22, I encountered my 17 year old self in the basement bar of a youth hostel in Athens. He dressed like I did (when I was 17), he talked about the same things in the same way, he looked broadly the same. I considered an intervention, since he was clearly booring those he was talking to (another confirmation that it was truly my 17 year old self), but decided that the question about time travel could become awkward.

What happened to that timeline, to that other just slightly younger me, I do not know. Perhaps things sped up and we joined together (I'd guess at about age 27 if I had to). Or perhaps the timelines have diverged, and there's another version of me somewhere both so close and so far, doing what I do and leaving me very glad that I cannot watch him do it.

At a bike shop that I frequently visited during my student days, I was often greeted warmly and told they saw me at Korsakoff (an alternative club in Amsterdam) that weekend. I did occasionally visit that club, but not that often, and certainly not every weekend before I'd visit that bike shops. And yet nearly always they claimed they'd seen me there.

Clearly I must have a doppelganger there. Or maybe I'm the doppelganger. Never met him, though. Maybe I should have visited Korsakoff more often.

Ties well together with Gibson:

He was sitting on the floor of Gentry's loft. His face was wet. Cherry was kneeling beside him, close, her hands on his shoulders.

"You did time?"

He nodded.

"Chemo-penal unit?"

"Yeah ... "

"Induced Korsakov's?"

The Schrödinger equation as we know it is linear, but I believe that we don't know that we have discovered all the terms of it.

If there are yet undiscovered terms and the full equation is not linear then it turns out that question of whether the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics versus the many-worlds interpretation is not just a philosophical question. With a nonlinear Schrödinger equation different "worlds" of the many-worlds interpretation can interact.

Maybe you ran into a you from a different reality.

I had a doppelganger of sorts when I was in high school. We were in the same classes, etc., looked a lot alike, except that he had blond hair and habitually wore a tan trench coat, while I had black hair and habitually wore a black trench coat. It was generally considered that I was the evil twin.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com