Being is a slippery yet important thing.
The Rashomon Effect is how things look different from different perspectives -- often REALLY different when the things are complex, people with different perspectives are looking at them, etc. A simple way to get an idea of it is to stare at this Necker cube and Rubin vase a bit. Both the interpretations of each are "real".
We might think of physics as "cut and dried", however there are many mysteries, one of which is this.
"They seem to be able to get through several wickets at the same time" where "wicket" is a small gate. One of my favorite ways of thinking about this is the "Many Worlds" interpretation. In this view, each "observation" results in a "fork" of the universe the observation is made in where that universe now takes two paths that have the same history up to the observation, but in one (in the common wave/particle example) a wave is observed, in the other a particle is observed. This is one way to get to the 1010 universes.
“One of the amazing characteristics of nature is this variety of interpretational schemes,” ( Feynman). What’s more, this multifariousness applies only to the true laws of nature—it doesn’t work if the laws are misstated. “If you modify the laws much, you find you can only write them in fewer ways,”. Feynman again: . “I always found that mysterious, and I do not know the reason why it is that the correct laws of physics are expressible in such a tremendous variety of ways. They seem to be able to get through several wickets at the same time.”
Even as physicists work to understand the material content of the universe—the properties of particles, the nature of the big bang, the origins of dark matter and dark energy—their work is shadowed by this Rashomon effect, which raises metaphysical questions about the meaning of physics and the nature of reality. Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, is one of today’s leading theoreticians. “The miraculous shape-shifting property of the laws is the single most amazing thing I know about them,” he told me, this past fall. It “must be a huge clue to the nature of the ultimate truth.”
The two universes vary by only that observation to begin the "fork" -- however the level of "observation", or "decision" that might cause a fork is unknown.
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