Hartmut Neven, head of Google’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, revealed that the company’s new quantum chip, Willow, performed calculations across multiple parallel worlds simultaneously.
This marks the first time in history that an official scientific communiqué has stated such a claim.
“Willow’s performance is astonishing: in less than five minutes, it performed a calculation that would take ten billion years on one of today’s fastest supercomputers. If you want to write it, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,” Neven said. “This far exceeds the age of the universe.”
But Neven concluded with a surprising twist: Willow’s results “support the idea that quantum computations occur in many parallel universes, consistent with the theory that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.”
Google’s new quantum chip, Willow, is making waves because the qubits—units of quantum information—can now reliably protect each other from errors.
2025 marks the 100th anniversary of quantum mechanics, and the UN has declared it the International Year of Quantum Science and Quantum Technologies.
In the days following the announcement, social media buzzed with the implication that Google had proven the existence of parallel universes.
But why would a quantum computer be able to suggest this, and why might there be many other universes besides our own that we haven’t noticed?
The most widespread interpretation for a long time, the “Copenhagen interpretation,” suggests that a quantum object is initially in a state of all possible properties (e.g., in different locations) but “chooses” one option when measured, causing the others to disappear.
In recent decades, however, another perspective has gained traction: the “Many Worlds Interpretation.”
Developed in 1957 by Hugh Everett, this theory challenged the idea that alternative properties simply vanish upon measurement. Everett proposed that all properties are equally real, even those we cannot observe, leading to a radical consequence:
With each observation, the universe divides into countless worlds, where each possible property is realized.
If we see a particle at position A, another world exists where a copy of us observes the particle at position B.
Initially, Everett’s view wasn’t widely accepted. This changed in the 1970s when Dieter Zeh and others discovered decoherence:
When a quantum object interacts with its environment, its entangled properties seem to separate. Each choice forms its own strand of reality with the environment. This well-documented decoherence may explain why we no longer observe some properties of the object, even though they should still exist.
Proponents of the Many Worlds Interpretation see it as proof that many versions of reality exist simultaneously in our universe.
The multiverse, therefore, consists of many worlds existing in one place, parallel but inaccessible to each other.
This multiverse could also exist in space, with another universe beginning at the end of our own, forming an infinite “sea” of universes.
These realities align with the “Strong Anthropic Principle,” which posits that multiple universes or regions within our universe have different initial configurations and possibly different sets of physical laws.
In most universes, conditions wouldn’t be right for complex life to develop; only in a few, like ours, could intelligent beings evolve and question:
“Why is the universe as we see it?” The simple answer is: “If it were different, we wouldn’t be here!”
The universe must possess properties that allow life to develop at some point in its history because a) a possible universe must be designed to create and maintain “observers,” b) observers are necessary for the universe’s existence (participatory universe), or c) a set of different universes is necessary for our universe’s existence.