Though my work is primarily in classical wave optics, I maintain an avid interest in quantum physics (see my posts here and here for example) and especially all the weird implications of it, including the various attempts to make the theory philosophically consistent.
Though the theory is mathematically rigorous and agrees with experiment perfectly to this point, our default interpretation of it — usually called the Copenhagen interpretation and first developed in the 1920s — simply cannot be correct! Many attempts have been made to address this issue and philosophically “fix” quantum physics, including the 1957 hypothesis by Hugh Everett III that nowadays is usually referred to as the “many worlds” hypothesis. Everett’s idea seems to imply that there are an uncountably infinite number of universes created at every instant of time, which seems at a glance like it is just replacing one interpretation problem with an even worse one!
In this post, I thought I would discuss the “many worlds” hypothesis and muse over how it works and how it honestly isn’t any weirder than any other interpretation of quantum physics. It’s grown on me over the past few years. Like I said, I am not an expert here, so these are my “musings” more than a rigorous defense. I will along the way however talk about the history of quantum physics and why we need an alternative interpretation, even if “many worlds” turns out not to be the one.
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Skulls in the Stars 