A pair of physicists from Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University (IKBFU) in Russia recently proposed an entirely new view of the cosmos. Their research takes the wacky idea that we’re living in a computer simulation and mashes it up with the mind-boggling “many worlds” theory to say that, essentially, our entire universe is part of an immeasurably large quantum system spanning “uncountable” multiverses.

When you think about quantum systems, like IBM and Google’s quantum computers, we usually imagine a device that’s designed to work with subatomic particles – qubits – to perform quantum calculations.