Sunday, July 08, 2007

Revisiting the many worlds

There's a good article available for free from Nature on the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum physics.

The article has a footnoted link to a short biography of Hugh Everett, who came up with the interpretation. Interestingly, he believed one of the odder ideas that some argue is implicit in the "many-worlds" theory:
Everett firmly believed that his many-worlds theory guaranteed him immortality: His consciousness, he argued, is bound at each branching to follow whatever path does not lead to death —and so on ad infinitum. (Sadly, Everett's daughter Liz, in her later suicide note, said she was going to a parallel universe to be with her father.)
Stranger than fiction.

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