Existential Crisis! Many-Worlds Theory Confirmed

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” So declares Shakespeare’s Hamlet after discovering, among other things, the reality of ghosts. Now quantum physicists have taken a step closer to embracing a theory that says there are not only more things in heaven and earth; there are more heavens and earths — in fact an infinitude of them, making up a “multiverse” of all possible things.

The news here, which I’ll try to clarify in layman’s terms below, comes from a small conference of quantum physicists in Waterloo, Ontario, last weekend, where two Oxford researchers, David Wallace and Simon Saunders, reported a solid mathematical confirmation of the controversial “many worlds interpretation” of quantum physics.

New Scientist magazine quoted Andy Albrecht, a physicist at UC-Davis, saying, “This work will go down as one of the most important developments in the history of science.” That could be an understatement. Acceptance of the many-worlds interpretation, in its present form, could cause an existential earthquake more severe even than those brought about by Darwin and Galileo.

The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) is sometimes popularly referred to as the “theory of parallel universes.” As such, it is apt to seem like a bit of hand-waving, sci-fi speculation ginned up by some cosmologist in his spare time. In fact it is anything but that.

Remember how Einstein used to fret about some of the implications of quantum theory? That the theory did not allow firm predictions about the behavior of particles at the quantum level, but threw up only a haze of probabilities, really bothered him. In a letter to fellow scientist Max Born in 1926, he famously wrote, “Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.”

A Maryland-born physicist, Hugh Everett III, felt much the same way. At Princeton in 1957, where he studied under the famous physicist and cosmologist John Archibald Wheeler (coiner of the term black hole), he published the concept of MWI as his Ph.D. thesis. Essentially, Everett argued that God does not play dice – that all the possible characteristics of a particle at any given moment, as defined in the equations of quantum mechanics, are not an abstract set of “probabilities” but are all the real characteristics of the particle in all possible alternate “worlds.” (more…)