Of course there's also a less dramatic interpretation: the universe trundles along obeying the local laws of quantum mechanics, and does exactly one thing ... which just happens, for purely mathematical reasons, to equal the sum of all the things that it might have done.
Which interpretation do you buy?
Mathematically, if one is `right' then so is the other. Physically, though, they carry very different implications about how the world works. Our point is that, as for the classical particle, their mathematical equivalence does not require you to accept their physical truth as descriptions of reality. Any more than the equivalence of Newton's laws with the principle of least action obliges you to believe in intelligent particles that can predict the future.
The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, then, is resting on dodgy ground even though its mathematical foundations are impeccable. But the usual presentation of that interpretation goes further, by adding a hefty dose of narrativium. This is precisely what appeals to SF authors, but it's a pity that it stretches the interpretation well past breaking-point.
What we are usually told is this. At every instant of time, whenever a choice has to be made, the universe splits into a series of `parallel worlds' in which each of the choices happens. Yes, in this world you got up, had cornflakes for breakfast, and walked to work. But somewhere `out there' in the vastness of the multiverse, there is another universe in which you had kippers for breakfast, which made you leave the house a minute later, so that when you walked across the road you had an argument with a bus, and lost, fatally.
What's wrong here is not, strangely enough, the contention that this world is `really' a sum of many others. Perhaps it is, on a quantum level of description. Why not? But it is wrong to describe those alternative worlds in human terms, as scenarios where everything follows a narrative that makes sense to the human mind. As worlds where `bus' or `kipper' have any meaning at all. And it is even less justifiable to pretend that every single one of those parallel worlds is a minor variation on this one, in which some human-level choice happens differently.
If those parallel worlds exist at all, they are described by changing various components of a quantum wave function whose complexity is beyond human comprehension. The results need not resemble humanly comprehensible scenarios. Just as the sound of a clarinet can be decomposed into pure tones, but most combinations of those tones do not correspond to any clarinet.
The natural components of the human world are buses and kippers. The natural components of the quantum wave function of the world are not the quantum wave functions of buses and kippers. They are altogether different, and they carve up reality in a different way. They flip electron spins, rotate polarisations, shift quantum phases.
They do not turn cornflakes into kippers.
It's like taking a story and making random changes to the letters, shifting words around, probably changing the instructions that the printer uses to make the letters, so that they correspond to no alphabet known to humanity. Instead of starting with the Ankh-Morpork national anthem and getting the Hedgehog Song, you just get a meaningless jumble. Which is perhaps as well.
According to Max Tegmark, writing in the May 2003 issue of Scientific American, physicists currently recognise four distinct levels of parallel universes. At the first level, some distant region of the universe replicates, almost exactly, what is going on in our own region. The second level involves more or less isolated `bubbles', baby universes, in which various attributes of the physical laws, such as the speed of light, are different, though the basic laws are the same. The third level is Everett's many-worlds quantum parallelism. The fourth includes universes with radically different physical laws - not mere variations on the theme of our own universe, but totally distinct systems described by every conceivable mathematical structure.
Tegmark makes a heroic attempt to convince us that all of these levels really do exist - that they make testable predictions, are scientifically falsifiable if wrong, and so on. He even manages to reinterpret Occam's razor, the philosophical principle that explanations should be kept as simple as possible, to support his view.
All of this, speculative as it may seem, is good frontier cosmology and physics. It's exactly the kind of theorising that a Science of Discworld book ought to discuss: imaginative, mind-boggling, cutting-edge. We've come to the reluctant conclusion, though, that the arguments have serious flaws. This is a pity, because the concept of parallel worlds is dripping with enough narrativium to make any SF author out-salivate Pavlov's dogs.
We'll summarise Tegmark's main points, describe some of the evidence that he cites in their favour, offer a few criticisms, and leave you to form your own opinions.
Level 1 parallel worlds arise if - because - space is infinite. Not so far back we told you it is finite, because the Big Bang happened a finite time ago so it's not had time to expand to an infinite extent. [1] Apparently, though, data on the cosmic microwave background do not support a finite universe. Even though a very large finite one would generate the same data.
`Is there a copy of you reading this article?' Tegmark asks. Assuming the universe is infinite, he tells us that `even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere'. A copy of you is likelier than many, so it must happen. Where? A straightforward calculation indicates that `you have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the power 10^21 metres from here'. Not 10^21 metres, which is already 25 times the size of the currently observable universe, but 1 followed by 1028 zeros. Not only that: a complete copy of (the observable part of) our universe should exist about 10 to the power 10^118 metres away. And beyond that ...
We need a good way to talk about very big numbers. Symbols like 10^118 are too formal. Writing out all the zeros is pointless, and usually impossible. The universe is big, and the multiverse is substantially bigger. Putting numbers to how big is not entirely straightforward, and finding something that can also be typeset is even harder.
[1] Curiously, it could expand to infinity in a finite time if it accelerated sufficiently rapidly. Expand by one light-year after one minute, by another light-year after half a minute, by another after a quarter of a minute ... do a Zeno, and after two minutes, you have an infinite universe. But it's not expanding that fast, and no one thinks it did so in the past,
either.
Fortunately, we've already solved that problem with our earlier convention: if `umpty' is any number, then `umptyplex' will mean 10^umpty, which is 1 followed by umpty zeros.
When umpty = 118 we get 118plex, which is roughly the number of protons in the universe. When umpty is 118plex we get 118plexplex, which is the number that Tegmark is asking us to think about, 10 to the power 10 to the power 118. Those numbers arise because a `Hubble volume' of space - one the size of the observable universe - has a large but finite number of possible quantum states.
The quantum world is grainy, with a lower limit to how far space and time can be divided. So a sufficiently large region of space will contain such a vast number of Hubble volumes that every one of those quantum states can be accommodated. Specifically, a Hubble volume contains 118plex protons. Each has two possible quantum states. That means there are 2 to the power 118plex possible configurations of quantum states of protons. One of the useful rules in this type of mega-arithmetic is that the `lowest' number in the plexified stack - here 2 - can be changed to something more convenient, such as 10, without greatly affecting the top number. So, in round numbers, a region 118plexplex metres across can contain one copy of each Hubble volume.
Level 2 worlds arise on the assumption that spacetime is a kind of foam, in which each bubble constitutes a universe. The main reason for believing this is `inflation', a theory that explains why our universe is relativistically flat. In a period of inflation, space rapidly stretches, and it can stretch so far that the two ends of the stretched bit become independent of each other because light can't get from one to the other fast enough to connect them causally. So spacetime ends up as a foam, and ea
ch bubble probably has its own variant of the laws of physics - with the same basic mathematical form, but different constants.
Level 3 parallel worlds are those that appear in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which we've already tackled.
Everything described so far pales into insignificance when we come to level 4. Here, the various universes involved can have radically different laws of physics from each other. All conceivable mathematical structures, Tegmark tells us, exist here:
How about a universe that obeys the laws of classical physics, with no quantum effects? How about time that comes in discrete steps, as for computers, instead of being continuous? How about a universe that is simply an empty dodecahedron? In the level N multiverse, all these alternative realities actually exist.
But do they?
In science, you get evidence from observations or from experiments.
Direct observational tests of Tegmark's hypothesis are completely out of the question, at least until some remarkable spacefaring technology comes into being. The observable universe extends no more than 27plex metres from the Earth. An object (even the size of our visible universe) that is 118plexplex metres away cannot be observed now, and no conceivable improvement on technology can get round that. It would be easier for a bacterium to observe the entire known universe than for a human to observe an object 118plexplex metres away.
We are sympathetic to the argument that the impossibility of direct experimental tests does not make the theory unscientific. There is no direct way to test the previous existence of dinosaurs, or the timing (or occurrence) of the Big Bang. We infer these things from indirect evidence. So what indirect evidence is there for infinite space and distant copies of our own world?
Space is infinite, Tegmark says, because the cosmic microwave background tells us so. If space were finite, then traces of that finitude would show up in the statistical properties of the cosmic
background and the various frequencies of radiation that make it up.
This is a curious argument. Only a year or so ago, some mathematicians used certain statistical features of the cosmic microwave background to deduce that not only is the universe finite, but that it is shaped a bit like a football.* There is a paucity of very long-wavelength radiation, and the best reason for not finding it is that the universe is too small to accommodate such wavelengths. Just as a guitar string a metre long cannot support a vibration with a wavelength of 100 metres - there isn't room to fit the wave into the available space.
The main other item of evidence is of a very different nature - not an observation as such, but an observation about how we interpret observations. Cosmologists who analyse the microwave background to work out the shape and size of the universe habitually report their findings in the form `there is a probability of one in a thousand that such and such a shape and size could be consistent with the data'. Meaning that with 99.9 per cent probability we rule out that size and shape. Tegmark tells us that one way to interpret this is that at most one Hubble volume in a thousand, of that size and shape, would exhibit the observed data. `The lesson is that the multiverse theory can be tested and falsified even when we cannot see the other universes. The key is to predict what the ensemble of parallel universes is and to specify a probability distribution over that ensemble.'
This is a remarkable argument. Fatally, it confuses actual Hubble volumes with potential ones. For example, if the size and shape under consideration is `a football about 27plex metres across [1] - a fair guess for our own Hubble volume - then the `one in a thousand' probability is a calculation based on a potential array of one thousand footballs of that size. These are not part of a single infinite universe: they are distinct conceptual `points' in a phase space of big
[1] Actually a more sophisticated gadget called the Poincare dodecahedral space, a slightly weird shape invented more than a century ago to show that topology is not as simple as we'd like it to be. But people understand 'football'.
footballs. If you lived in such a football and made such observations, then you'd expect to get the observed data on about one occasion in a thousand.
There is nothing in this statement that compels us to infer the actual existence of those thousand footballs - let alone to embed the lot in a single, bigger space, which is what we are being asked to do. In effect, Tegmark is asking us to accept a general principle: that whenever you have a phase space (statisticians would say a sample space) with a well-defined probability distribution, then everything in that phase space must be real.
This is plain wrong.
A simple example shows why. Suppose that you toss a coin a hundred times. You get a series of tosses something like HHTTTHH ... THH. The phase space of all possible such tosses contains precisely 2100 such sequences. Assuming the coin is fair, there is a sensible way to assign a probability to each such sequence - namely the chance of getting it is one in 2100. And you can test that `distribution' of probabilities in various indirect ways. For instance, you can carry out a million experiments, each yielding a series of 100 tosses, and count what proportion has 50 heads and 50 tails, or 49 heads and 51 tails, whatever. Such an experiment is entirely feasible.
If Tegmark's principle is right, it now tells us that the entire phase space of coin-tossing sequences really does exist. Not as a mathematical concept, but as physical reality.
However, coins do not toss themselves. Someone has to toss them.
If you could toss 100 coins every second, it would take about 24plex years to generate 2100 experiments. That is roughly 100 trillion times the age of the universe. Coins have been in existence for only a few thousand years. The phase space of all sequences of 100 coin tosses is not real. It exists only as potential.
Since Tegmark's principle doesn't work for coins, it makes no sense to suppose that it works for universes.
The evidence advanced in favour of level 4 parallel worlds is even thinner. It amounts to a mystical appeal to Eugene Wigner's famous remark about `the unusual effectiveness of mathematics' as a description of physical reality. In effect, Tegmark tells us that if we can imagine something, then it has to exist.
We can imagine a purple hippopotamus riding a bicycle along the edge of the Milky Way while singing Monteverdi. It would be lovely if that meant it had to exist, but at some point a reality check is in order.
We don't want to leave you with the impression that we enjoy pouring cold water over every imaginative attempt to convey a feeling for some of the remarkable concepts of modern cosmology and physics. So we'll end with a very recent addition to the stable of parallel worlds, which has quite a few things going for it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the main thing not currently going for it is a shred of experimental evidence.
The new theory on the block is string theory. It provides a philosophically sensible answer to the age-old question: why are we here? And it does so by invoking gigantic numbers of parallel universes.
It is just much more careful how it handles them.
Our source is an article, `The String Theory Landscape' by Raphael Bousso and Joseph Polchinski, in the September 2004 issue of Scientific American - a special issue on the theme of Albert Einstein.
If there is a single problem that occupies the core of modern physics, it is that of unifying quantum mechanics with relativity. This search for a `theory of everything' is needed because although both of those theories are extraordinarily successful in helping us to understand and predict various aspects of the natural world, they are not totally consistent with each other. Finding a consistent, unified theory is hard, and we don't yet have one. But there's one mathematically attractive attempt, string theory, which is conceptually appealing even though there's no observational evidence for it.
String theory holds that what we usually consider to be individual points of spacetime, dimensionless dots with no interesting structure of their own, are actually very, very tiny multidimensional surfaces with complicated shapes. The standard analogy is a garden hose. Seen fr
om some way off, a hose looks like a line, which is a onedimensional space - the dimension being distance along the hose. Look more closely, though, and you see that the hose has two extra dimensions, at right angles to that line, and that its shape in those directions is a circular band.
Maybe our own universe is a bit like that hosepipe. Unless we look very closely, all we see is three dimensions of space plus one of time - relativity. An awful lot of physics is observed in those dimensions alone, so phenomena of that type have a nice four-dimensional description - relativity again. But other things might happen along extra `hidden' dimensions, like the thickness of the hose. For instance, suppose that at each point of the apparent four-dimensional spacetime, what seems to be a point is actually a tiny circle, sticking out at right angles to spacetime itself. That circle could vibrate. If so, then it would resemble the quantum description of a particle. Particles have various `quantum numbers' such as spin. These numbers occur as whole number multiples of some basic amount. So do vibrations of a circle: either one wave fits into the circle, or two, or three ... but not two and a quarter, say.
This is why it's called `string theory'. Each point of spacetime is replaced by a tiny loop of string.
In order to reconstruct something that agrees with quantum theory, however, we can't actually use a circular string. There are too many distinct quantum numbers, and plenty of other problems that have to be overcome. The suggestion is that instead of a circle, we have to use a more complicated, higher-dimensional shape, known as a `bran'.[1] Think of this as a surface, only more so. There are many
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