Abstract
Hugh Everett III is credited as the father of the Many Worlds theory, although the name was only later introduced by Brice DeWitt, and it is disputed historically whether Everett really believed in the reality of many worlds. What is not disputed is Everett’s insistence that we must take quantum mechanics seriously on all scales. He thus introduced the concept of the universal wave function, which has already played a crucial role in earlier chapters. Everett recognized that the shifty split, which the Copenhagen interpretation had introduced between the microscopic quantum regime and the macroscopic classical regime, couldn’t be maintained if quantum mechanics was to provide a fundamental description of nature.
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Notes
- 1.
J.S. Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics. Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn. 2004, p. 194.
- 2.
For a detailed discussion, see D. Wallace, The Emergent Multiverse: Quantum Theory According to the Everett Interpretation. Oxford University Press, 2012.
- 3.
Spontaneous decoherence may cause the sub-branches to branch even further, but the total weight of branches registering a particular sequence of measurement results doesn’t change.
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Dürr, D., Lazarovici, D. (2020). The Many Worlds Theory. In: Understanding Quantum Mechanics . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40068-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40068-2_6
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