You don’t have to believe in the multiverse. Here’s why.
Physicists in the last 10 years have been losing the battle against an idea that was once so radical it was scoffed at by the biggest names in physics. I’m talking about the multiverse, the idea that there are countless parallel universes and that the universe is constantly splitting into more.
The notion of parallel universes is far from new, but until the 1950s it existed primarily in the realm of philosophy and religion. But in 1957 an argument over the interpretation of quantum mechanics resulted in a graduate student, Hugh Everett III, publishing his Ph.D. thesis on this astounding idea: that quantum mechanics could be explained more completely if we interpreted it through the lens of parallel universes. His thesis made little impact on the world of physics which was slowly building up its understanding of the fundamental forces of nature and had little patience for philosophical detours. Thesis published, Everett left academics for good.
To understand the nature of this argument, however, we need to go back further in time, back to the 1920s and ’30s. I wrote about one part of the argument extensively in my article on quantum uncertainty. At that time, the argument between the likes of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, was over how quantum uncertainty worked, and we found that in any quantum experiment, it appears that…
