And all competing interpretations, it seemed, predicted the same observable results.īut maybe not. It doesn’t have anything to say about what unseen, or deeply hidden, mechanisms might be responsible for the recipe. That standard approach is often glibly derided as “shut up and calculate,” since all the quantum math does is provide a recipe for calculating the likelihood of different experimental results. But in recent decades, many physicists have found it (or variants of it) preferable to the traditional view of quantum mechanics associated with Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Many Worlds is a well-known quantum interpretation, originated in the 1950s by American physicist Hugh Everett III. “The theory describes many copies of what we think of as ‘the universe,’ ” Carroll writes, “each slightly different, but each truly real in some sense.” If you want to know where these branches are, he says, “There is no ‘place’ where those branches are hiding they simply exist simultaneously, along with our own, effectively out of contact with it.” As each measurement is made, this view of quantum theory insists, additional universes are instantly created. When the measurement is made, the universe splits, branching into two copies, one with the spin up, the other with the spin down. Measuring the spin of an electron, for instance, might yield the result that the spin axis points either up or down.
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