Original Ideas

How often do you manage to assemble a few previous ideas in a way in which it is genuinely possible that nobody has assembled them before - that is, that you've had a truly original thought? When you do, how do you go about checking whether that's the case? Or does such a thing matter to you at all?

For example: last night, I briefly considered the 'Multiple Interacting Worlds' interpretation of quantum physics, in which it is postulated that there are a large number of universes, each of which has pure Newtonian physics internally, but whose interactions with near-identical universes cause what we observe as quantum phenomena. It's very similar to the 'Multiple Worlds' interpretation, except instead of new universes branching from old ones at every moment in an ever-spreading bush, all the branches branched out at the Big Bang. It occurred to me that while the 'large number' of universes is generally treated as being infinite, my limited understanding of the theory doesn't mean that that's necessarily the case. And if there are a finite number of parallel worlds interacting with our own, each of which is slightly different and only interacts for as long as the initial conditions haven't diverged too much... then, at some point in the future, the number of such universes interacting with ours will decrease, eventually to zero, thus reducing "quantum" effects until our universe operates under fully Newtonian principles. And looking backwards, this implies that "quantum" effects may have once been stronger when there were more universes that had not yet diverged from our own. All of which adds up to a mechanism by which certain universal constants will gradually change over the lifetime of the universe.

It's not everyday that I think of a brand-new eschatology to set alongside the Big Crunch, Big Freeze, and Big Rip.

And sure, until I dive into the world of physics to start figuring out which universal constants would change, and in which direction, it's not even worth calling the above a 'theory'; at best, it's technobabble that could be used as background for a science-fiction story. But as far as I can tell, it's /novel/ technobabble. Which is what inspired the initial paragraph of this post: do you do anything in particular with potentially truly original ideas?