The second is something that realizes one of those possibilities and eliminates all the others. One is a smooth, fully deterministic wave function: a mathematical expression that conveys information about a particle in the form of numerous possibilities for its location and characteristics.
In quantum mechanics, the world unfolds through a combination of two basic ingredients. It has successfully withstood almost a century of tests, including French physicist Alain Aspect’s experiments confirming entanglement, or action at a distance between certain types of quantum phenomena. Quantum mechanics is the basic framework of modern subatomic physics. Largely because of its purely logical character, Carroll calls Everett’s brainchild “the best view of reality we have”. In Something Deeply Hidden, Carroll cogently explains the many-worlds theory and its post-Everett evolution, and why our world nevertheless looks the way it does. It has become a staple of popular culture, although the plots of the many films and television series inspired by it invariably flout the theory by relying on contact between the parallel worlds, as in the 2011 movie Another Earth. Six decades on, the theory is one of the most bizarre yet fully logical ideas in human history, growing directly out of the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics without introducing extraneous elements. (The many-worlds theory differs from the concept of the multiverse, which pictures many self-contained universes in different regions of space-time.) Originated by US physicist Hugh Everett in the late 1950s, this envisions our Universe as just one of numerous parallel worlds that branch off from each other, nanosecond by nanosecond, without intersecting or communicating. The fox can reach the grapes, he argues, with the many-worlds theory. That, Carroll declares, encapsulates how physicists treat the wacky implications of quantum mechanics.Ĭarroll wants that to stop. Finding them beyond his grasp, but refusing to admit failure, the fox declares the grapes to be inedible and turns away. A hungry fox tries to reach a bunch of grapes dangling from a vine.
Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime Sean Carroll Oneworld (2019)Īt the beginning of Something Deeply Hidden, Sean Carroll cites the tale of the fox and the grapes from Aesop’s Fables.
Originating in the 1950s, the many-worlds theory posits that parallel worlds constantly branch off from each other, moment by moment.
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