The Garden of Forking Paths

Fifteen years before Hugh Everett formulated the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, Jorge Luis Borges, the erudite master of fantastic fiction, published his short story The Garden of Forking Paths (El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan) in 1941. In it, a sinologist discovers an old manuscript by a Chinese writer in which a single story is told in many alternative ways, often contradicting one another. The scholar explains to the hero, the writer’s grandson, that his grandfather had conceived of time as ‘a garden of many forking paths’, in which all things happen in parallel, branching in infinite ways and so creating many parallel gardens.