Physics is only just catching up” at Aeon
Sean Carroll, “ Splitting the Universe: Hugh Everett blew up quantum mechanics with his Many-Worlds theory in the 1950s. The price we pay for such a powerful and simple unification of quantum dynamics is a large number of separate worlds. There’s not even anything special about macroscopic systems, other than the fact that they can’t help but interact and become entangled with the environment. The ‘observer’ could be an earthworm, a microscope or a rock. Consciousness, in particular, has nothing to do with it. And there’s nothing special about what constitutes ‘a measurement’ or ‘an observer’ – a measurement is any interaction that causes a quantum system to become entangled with the environment, creating a branching into separate worlds, and an observer is any system that brings about such an interaction. We don’t need special rules about making an observation: all that happens is that the wave function keeps chugging along in accordance with the Schrödinger equation. The Many-Worlds formulation of quantum mechanics removes once and for all any mystery about the measurement process and collapse of the wave function. Here is Carroll, once again, defending the multiverse, and doing a much better job of explaining what it would really be like than many other believers in the idea do: A publisher simply can’t buy all the publicity a writer can generate by getting out there and promoting his own book. Cosmologist Sean Carroll is a publisher’s dream, the way he promotes his new book, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime.ĭon’t knock his approach, please! When acting as a coach for local writers, I (O’Leary for News), spend quite a lot of time urging aspiring writers to do exactly what Sean Carroll is doing and I will probably use him as an example.
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