There Are Many Mansions

 

  On a Spiritual Interpretation

 of the Many Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics

John 14:2: "In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you."

A couple of days ago my father in law asked me to listen to a CBC podcast about (among other things) quantum gravity and the role of imagination in physics and give him my feedback. This appealed to my ego as he is no intellectual slouch. Appealing to my ego is a successful strategy in motivating me to write. Besides, I'd been thinking for some time of writing an article about the many worlds interpretation of QMech and it seems the time is ripe.

Werner Heisenberg's now famous Uncertainty Principle (which he mathematically  proved from accepted and verified physics equations) is that one cannot know with exact precision both the position and the momentum (directional velocity multiplied by the mass) of an object. This was the death knell for classical physics. The widely held opinion of the time, that all of physics was essentially known and that all that was left was mopping up was shown to be false. The billiard ball universe of the late 19th century where everything could be completely predicted from the initial state play came unglued.

Two interpretations of this uncertainty were available: 1) that observation interfered with the observed phenomena because of a limitation in the observation or 2) space-time itself had a certain kind of uncertainty built into it. To paraphrase the Copenhagen interpretation, space-time was itself as holy as Swiss cheese.

Surprisingly, though new to physics, this was not a new problem at all. It was a very physical version of Zeno's Paradox.: you can't get anywhere at all from where you are now. It begs the question still unanswered by today's physics: is reality discrete or is it continuous? The current answer appears to be that at the distances of the Planck wavelength space-time is discrete. Distance itself comes in little quantized packages. I'll come back to this point later but for the moment let us focus more on what the U.P. might mean for predictability.

Keeping in mind the Copenhagen interpretation of the U.P. we note that there are many possible ways a physical system may develop from a specific state and they are all dependent on probability. Since the mathematical description of how wavicles (wave/particle dualities) propagate is the Scroedinger equation which intrinsically incorporates probability rather than trying to determine exact outcomes, the outcomes themselves are probabilistic.

Suppose that the wave equations predict an equal likelihood of two possible outcomes then there is no a- priori reason why one outcome would be favored over the other. This leads to the ""Many Worlds" interpretation of  quantum mechanics. The idea is that there is a multiverse, a multiplicity of universes, in which every possibility is played out.

Scroedinger himself formulated his famous cat paradox from these elements. Suppose, he proposed, that a cat is put in a bell jar connected to a device set to dispense a lethal gas if a geiger counter counts enough radio active decay in a certain time period. Since the radio active decay of substances is governed by quantum effects that have probabilistic properties can we predict that the cat (after a certain time) whether will be alive or will it be dead?

It's a very famous problem. I'm convinced that we human's tend to look at it the wrong way. Instead of looking at it from the viewpoint of the rather heartless experimenter, let's look at it from the point of view of the cat. I.'ve met some strange cats in my time. I think our cat is just a little bit nuts. However, I have never met a suicidal cat. From the viewpoint of the cat, it's never in the universe where it is extinguished. The wave form of  it's consciousness ALWAYS COLLAPSES TO THE STATE WHERE IT LIVES.

In essence, the consciousness of the cat has made the choice as to which universe it's in. This puts a whole new slant on the idea of how our consciousness affects the universe around us. Maybe imagination is not just a mental creation tool, maybe it affects our physical reality.

"the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as a creator and governor of the realm of matter..." Sir James Jeans in The Mysterious Universe (1930)