Perhaps our universe is one created by a junior, or an intern, and this "creative" workaround got mocked on TheDailyWTF somewhere.
It's like a symbol in Ruby -- all instances of, say, :electron point to the same point in memory, they're just used all over the place. The sharing isn't problematic because you can't change :electron.
Why would you want to use 'electron' instead where every time you use it, you put another instance of it into memory?
And you don't need to be a junior or an intern to come up with an insanely bad design.
That's true, unfortunately - although lack of hands-on experience helps
Maybe it's computationally cheaper to define something as existing in all places and all times.
If the point is to have a jillion of electrons, each at the right time and place (for the observer), I assume a rather complicated mechanism must have been put in place to "tie the knot" just right - I mean to "navigate" the time-travelling electron just so it never fails to appear wherever, whenever it's expected.