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Doppelgängers share strikingly similar physical characteristics—they look so alike that, at times, these two unrelated people could easily pass for twins (or, at least, siblings).

Now, new research suggests that doppelgängers have more in common than meets the eye. People with very similar faces also share many of the same genes and lifestyle traits, according to a new paper published Tuesday in the journal Cell Reports.

It may seem obvious that people with similar facial features would also have some of the same DNA, but no one had scientifically proven this, until now. Thanks to the internet, it’s now easier than ever for researchers to track down and study doppelgängers.

To understand what was going on at the genetic level among look-alikes, scientists collaborated with the Canadian photographer François Brunelle. Since 1999, Brunelle has been traveling around the world to capture intimate portraits of strangers who look nearly identical to one another for his “I’m not a look-alike!” project.

Researchers asked 32 pairs of Brunelle’s models to answer questions about their lifestyles and submit samples of their DNA.

Using facial recognition software, the scientists analyzed headshots of the so-called “human doubles” and computed a score to quantify similarities among their faces. They compared the scores to those of identical twins and found that the software had awarded twin-like scores to exactly half of the doppelgänger pairs.

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Four pairs of “human doubles” included in the study Courtesy of François Brunelle

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If there’s one hallmark inherent to science, it’s that our understanding of how the Universe works is always open to revision in the face of new evidence. Whenever our prevailing picture of reality — including the rules it plays by, the physical contents of a system, and how it evolved from its initial conditions to the present time — gets challenged by new experimental or observational data, we must open our minds to changing our conceptual picture of the cosmos. This has happened many times since the dawn of the 20th century, and the words we use to describe our Universe have shifted in meaning as our understanding has evolved.

Yet, there are always those who cling to the old definitions, much like linguistic prescriptivists, who refuse to acknowledge that these changes have occurred. But unlike the evolution of colloquial language, which is largely arbitrary, the evolution of scientific terms must reflect our current understanding of reality. Whenever we talk about the origin of our Universe, the term “the Big Bang” comes to mind, but our understanding of our cosmic origins have evolved tremendously since the idea that our Universe even had an origin, scientifically, was first put forth. Here’s how to resolve the confusion and bring you up to speed on what the Big Bang originally meant versus what it means today.

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From a pre-existing state, inflation predicts that a series of universes will be spawned as inflation continues, with each one being completely disconnected from every other one, separated by more inflating space. One of these “bubbles,” where inflation ended, gave birth to our Universe some 13.8 billion years ago, where our entire visible Universe is just a tiny portion of that bubble’s volume. Each individual bubble is disconnected from all of the others, and each place where inflation ends gives rise to its own hot Big Bang.  Credit: Nicolle Rager Fuller)

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NASA can land a probe on Saturn’s largest moon, 764 million miles from Earth—yet no one has been able to mathematically demonstrate the exact positions of the Earth, sun, and our own moon at a given point in the future. Scientists can make estimates, but these all rely on simplifications.

Two-body problems, like mapping the movement of one planet around one star, are solvable. These binary orbits are easy to predict. But a serious complication arises if a third body is introduced. Our moon, which has the gravitational forces of both the sun and the Earth acting upon it simultaneously, is part of an infamous three-body problem.

Trying to solve for the movement of three large bodies in one another’s orbit creates a circular logic. The calculations rely on the initial positions of the three bodies, but these initial positions are unknowable over time because the bodies always affect one another in unpredictable ways. In the 300 years since Isaac Newton outlined the dilemma in his Principia, diligent physicists have only been able to offer special-case solutions for restricted versions of the problem. “In a nonlinear system like the chaotic three-body problem,” writes Caroline Delbert for Popular Mechanics, “all bets are off, and our intuitions are scrambled.”

The three-body problem is the best metaphor I’ve found for a social complexity that affects us all today—a problem resulting from the interaction of three major centers of gravity. This dynamic is scrambling our intuitions and making us long for order in what feels like an increasingly chaotic world. We’re caught on the inside of a three-city problem.

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Photo-illustration: WIRED staff; Getty Images

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