Hacking the Multiverse

The dirty little secret of quantum physics is the sand supporting the foundation of all of science.

This page was last updated 01/21/2012 04:29:57 AM -0000

(STARpod.org) -- The dirty little secret at the foundation of all of science remains a source of debate among the experts.

To overcome the issue, students are told not to think about the problem, since, to quote the late Richard Feynman, "no one understands quantum theory."

Instead, they are admonished to "just shut up and calculate."

It's called the measurement problem.

At the heart of the problem is a fuzzy dividing line between the reality of daily experience and a deterministic and fundamental quantum reality -- a theory that was worked out in the early years of modern physics by the greatest minds of the 20th Century.

As the years grow between the foundation of modern quantum physics, which brought about solid-state electronics and atomic bombs, and our latest efforts to understand the universe, physicists have been forced to confront the failure of a search for a Theory of Everything. Instead, their efforts have dragged them, often kicking and screaming along the way, into a Multiverse of parallel worlds and superstring theory landscapes which far exceed all of the atoms and atomic particles in the entire universe.

At the bottom, it all looks like an endless wasteland of sand.

Between the beach and the sky, an irreducible randomness injects itself between the real world of our sensory perceptions and the theory.

Noted mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose calls this the "R" or "reduction" problem. When we probe the deterministic quantum realm, something happens to reduce the possible to the actual.

The best the theory can offer is a quantum probability of the outcome.

Worse yet, all kinds of spooky quantum weirdness infects the mysterious, if exactly determined quantum world: atoms (and presumably things made from atoms, like you and me) can be in two places at the same time.

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When two particles part ways, they may remain "entangled" in what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." For all practical purposes, although they may be separated by light years, they act as if they were a single quantum system.

Even cause and effect can seem topsy turvy.

In the "delayed choice experiment," the path a particle took across the universe millions of years ago may be determined by how we decide to look for it when it arrives here today.

In spite of the metaphysical abuse of quantum theory at the hands of new age hucksters, the measurement problem remains a real problem buried by the success of the incredible accuracy of quantum theory.

In the 1950s, Hugh Everett III, then a student at Princeton, discovered what is now called the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum theory.

In his personal quest to understand the measurement problem, Everett realized it was enough to accept all of the possible worlds predicted by quantum mechanics as equally real.

In many worlds, every time you select  between two possible options, your mind and body split into two worlds representing each choice. Both options actually take place, but for all practical purposes they (and your mind and body) exist independently in different universes.

According to Everett's idea, the universe is constantly branching into alternative worlds, ultimately exploring every possibility.

Today, MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark is one of the strongest advocates of this strange view of the world.

Tegmark points to the latest observations of deep space. The new view of the cosmos supports the idea of an expanding (and accelerating) universe. The universe now appears to be "flat" and extending to infinity.

Cosmologists invoke the idea of a quantum fluctuation, a random bubble in the fabric of spacetime, smaller than an atom, spontaneously inflating into what we now observe as the universe.

Tegmark believes the quantum world explores every possibility in an infinity of all possible worlds. Beyond the quantum, Tegmark claims at vast distances between here and infinity, every possible world is explored within the confines of our own universe.

Other bubbles appearing from empty space inflate into alternative universes with different laws of physics.

Tegmark views this as further evidence to accept the reality of the quantum many worlds, since no new worlds are predicted beyond those existing at vast distances from the Earth.

As if all of this is not enough, Oxford quantum computing theorist Dr. David Deutsch, who is widely regarded as the father of the quantum computer, a theoretical machine capable of breaking any conventional code, adds time machines to the equations.

Deutsch believes the theory is clear: time machines are not forbidden by the quantum physics of a Multiverse.

Deutsch views a time machine as an information channel between alternative universes.

A time machine connects two universes which share a common history. They may appear to be within the same universe, however, once information appears from the future alternative into the present universe, they must necessarily diverge from each other, as the history in the future universe did not include the information from the future.

This counterintuitive point of view, as is the case with most quantum weirdness, is strange and self-consistent.

If Deutsch and Tegmark are correct, it may someday become possible to "hack the Multiverse" using time machines which share information between alternative universes.

For more information about the many worlds of parallel realities, please visit STARpod.org.

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