2
100%0% 25% 50% 75%
Fraction of queens face up
FIG. 2: According to quantum theory, a card perfectly b al-
anced on its edge will fall down in what is known as a “su-
perposition” — the card really is in two places at once. If a
gambler bets money on the queen landing face up, her own
state changes to become a superposition of two possible out-
comes — winning or losing the bet. In either of these parallel
worlds, the gambler is unaware of the other outcome and feels
as if the card fell randomly. If the gambler repeats this game
four times in a row, there will be 16 (2 × 2 × 2 × 2) possible
outcomes, or parallel worlds. In most of these worlds, it will
seem that q ueens occur randomly, with about 50% probabil-
ity. Only in two worlds will all four cards land the same way
up. If the game is continued many more times, almost every
gambler in each of the worlds will conclude that the laws of
probability apply even though th e underlying physics is not
random and, as Einstein would have put it, “God does not
play dice”.
many more ”undecided” [3]. I believe the upwards trend
is clear.
Why the change? I think there are several reasons.
Predictions of other types of para llel universes from co s-
mological inflation and string theory have increased tol-
erance for weird-sounding ideas. New experiments have
demonstrated quantum weirdness in ever larg er systems.
Finally, the discovery of a process known as decoherence
has a nswered crucial questions that Everett’s work had
left dang ling.
For example, if these parallel universes exist, then why
don’t we perceive them? Quantum superpositions can-
not be confined – as most quantum experiments are – to
the microworld. Beca use you are made o f atoms , then if
atoms can be in two places at once in superposition, so
can you (Figure 1).
The breakthrough came in 1970 with a seminal paper
by H. Dieter Zeh, who showed that the Schr¨odinger equa-
tion itself gives rise to a type of censorship. This effect
became known as “decoherence ”, and was worked out in
great detail by Wojciech Zurek, Zeh and others over the
following decades. Quantum superpositions were found
to remain observable only as long as they were kept secret
from the rest of the world. The quantum card in Figure 2
is constantly bumping into air molecules, photons, and
so on, which thereby find out whether it has fallen to
the left or to the right, destroying the coherence of the
supe rp osition and making it unobservable. Decoherence
also explains why states resembling classical physics have
sp e c ial status: they are the most robust to decoherence.
Science of philosophy?
The main motivation for introducing the no tion of ran-
dom wavefunction collapse into quantum physics had
been to e xplain why we perceive probabilities and not
strange macroscopic superpositions . After Everett had
shown that things wo uld appear rando m anyway (Fig-
ure 2) and decoherence had b e en found to explain why
we never perceived anything strange, much of this moti-
vation was gone. Even though the wavefunction techni-
cally never collapses in the Everett view, it is generally
agreed that decoherence produces an effect that looks like
a co llapse and smells like a collapse .
In my opinion, it is time to update the many quantum
textbooks that introduce wavefunction collapse as a fun-
damental postulate of quantum mechanics. The notion
of collapse still has utility as a calculational recipe, but
students should be told that it is probably not a funda-
mental proces s violating the Schr¨odinge r equation so as
to avoid any subsequent confusion. If you are consider-
ing a quantum textbook that does not mention “Everett”
and “decoherence” in the index, I recommend buying a
more modern one.
After 50 years we can c e le brate the fact that Everett’s
interpretation is still consistent with quantum observa-
tions, but we face another pressing question: is it science
or mere philosophy? The key point is that parallel uni-
verses are not a theory in themselves, but a prediction of
certain theories. For a theory to be falsifiable, we need
not observe and test all its predictions – one will do.
Because Einstein’s theory of General Relativity has
successfully predicted many things that we can observe,
we also take s eriously its predictions for things we can-
not, like the internal structure of black holes. Analo-
gously, successful pre dictio ns by unitary quantum me-
chanics have made scientists take more seriously its other
predictions, including parallel universes
Moreover, Everett’s theory is falsifiable by future lab
exp eriments: no matter how large a system they probe,
it s ays, they will not observe the wavefunction collapsing.