I previously wrote a post titled It’s Not Your Fault. That post describes the role of external forces in shaping every aspect of an individual’s life. The forces listed in that post can be categorized into two groups: laws of biology and laws of physics. Human beings do not choose these laws. When people make a decision, they act according to events that came before and which formed their brain in a certain way. Every behavior has a cause that a person did not choose, going all the way back to the beginning of the universe.
Even when people master natural laws by reprogramming stem cells or building particle colliders, they do so as a result of prior causes resulting from deterministic and random forces. Everybody is out of control. Their lives are determined by biological and physical forces they did not choose. Whether an individual rises to success or falls into failure is driven by a series of events dating back to the beginning of the universe.
Research from some physicists, including Nobel prize winner Gerard ‘t Hooft, indicates that determinism underlies quantum mechanics. Experiments might eventually disprove this idea of deterministic factors underlying quantum physics. Even if this happens, it then means chance controls the universe and everything in it. Quantum mechanics does not necessarily offer a way out of a universe driven by luck. If quantum indeterminacy is upheld, this shows that randomness and chance drive events in our probabilistic universe. This still supports the concept that everything in life is due to luck.
Either the universe is deterministic and people do not have free will, or the universe is random and people do not have free will. The many-worlds theory underlies the possibility of quantum computation and is worth serious consideration. The theory is deterministic in nature. It reconciles quantum mechanics with a causal universe. It eliminates the central role of human observers found in other interpretations of quantum mechanics. The following quotes come from physicists.
Hugh Everett in The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III
“I was of course struck, as many before and also many since, by the apparent paradox raised by the unique role assumed by the measurement process in quantum mechanics as it was conventionally espoused. It seemed to me unnatural that there should be a ‘magic’ process in which something quite drastic occurred (collapse of the wave function), while in all other times systems were assumed to obey perfectly natural continuous laws.”
“Quantum mechanics is reformulated in a way which eliminates its present dependence on the special treatment of observation of a system by an external observer.”
“It can lay claim to a certain completeness, since it applies to all systems, of whatever size, and is still capable of explaining the appearance of the macroscopic world. The price, however, is the abandonment of the concept of uniqueness of the observer, with its somewhat disconcerting philosophical implications.”
“It is this phenomenon which accounts for the classical appearance of the macroscopic world, the existence of solid bodies, etc. since we ourselves are strongly correlated to our environment. Even though it is possible for a macroscopic object to ‘smear out,’ we would never be aware of it due to the fact that the interactions between the object and our senses are so strong that we become correlated to it almost instantly. We now see that the wave mechanical description is really compatible with our ideas about the definiteness on a classical level, due to the existence of strong correlations.”
“The paradox is resolved easily since the outside wave function possesses more information, i.e. phase factors, etc. for the interaction, so that it leads to a causal description.”
“Our theory in a certain sense bridges the positions of Einstein and Bohr, since the complete theory is quite objective and deterministic… and yet on the subjective level… it is probabilistic in the strong sense that there is no way for observers to make any predictions better than the limitations imposed by the uncertainty principle.”
“It is now clear that the interpretation of quantum mechanics [i.e., von Neumann’s collapse postulate] with which we began is untenable if we are to consider a universe containing more than one observer.”
“The wave function itself is held to be the fundamental entity, obeying at all times a deterministic wave equation.”
“[Einstein] put his feeling colorfully by stating that he could not believe that a mouse could bring about drastic changes in the universe simply by looking at it. However, from the standpoint of our theory, it is not so much the system which is affected by an observation as the observer, who becomes correlated to the system… From the present viewpoint all elements of the superposition are equally ‘real.’ Only the observer state has changed, so as to become correlated with the state of the near system and hence naturally with that of the remote system also. The mouse does not affect the universe – only the mouse is affected [by the universe].”
“First of all, the particular difficulties with quantum mechanics that are discussed in my paper have mostly to do with the more common (at least in this country) form of quantum theory, as expressed for example by von Neumann, and not so much with the Bohr (Copenhagen) interpretation. The Bohr interpretation is to me even more unsatisfactory [with its] strange duality of adhering to a ‘reality’ concept for macroscopic physics and denying the same for the microcosm.”
Brian Greene in The Hidden Reality
“First, if quantum theory is right and the world unfolds probabilistically, why is Newton’s nonprobabilistic framework so good at predicting the motion of things from baseballs to planets to stars? The answer is that probability waves for big things usually (but not always, as we will shortly see) have a very particular shape.”
“The chance of a macroscopic body deviating from Newton’s predictions is so fantastically tiny that if you’d been keeping tabs on the cosmos for the last few billion years, the odds are overwhelming that you’d have never seen it happen.”
“The Many Worlds approach is, in some ways, the most conservative framework for defining quantum physics, and it’s important to understand why.”
“The mathematics of Many Worlds, unlike that of Copenhagen, is pure, simple, and constant. Schrödinger’s equation determines how probability waves evolve over time, and it is never set aside; it is always in effect. Schrödinger’s math guides the shape of probability waves, causing them to shift, morph, and undulate over time.”
“According to the Many Worlds approach, big things made of many particles do differ from small things made from one particle or a mere handful. Big things don’t stand outside the basic mathematical law of quantum mechanics, as Bohr thought, but they do allow probability waves to acquire enough variations that their capacity to interfere with one another becomes negligible.”
“Those who have studied Everett’s thesis generally agree that while his intent was clear – a deterministic theory that to its inhabitants nevertheless appears probabilistic – he didn’t convincingly spell out how to achieve it.”
“Yet it remains seductive to imagine that the mathematically simple, totally bare-bones, profoundly revolutionary Many Worlds approach yields the probabilistic predictions that form the foundation of belief in quantum theory.”
“A prominent proposal comes from a leading group of researchers at Oxford… their conclusion is that the numbers that Bohr and everyone since have been calculating and calling probabilities are the very numbers that should guide how you wager. That is, even though quantum theory is fully deterministic, you should treat the numbers as if they were probabilities.”
Brian Greene in The Fabric of the Cosmos
“In the Many Worlds framework, every potential outcome embodied in a quantum wavefunction – a particle’s spinning this way or that, another particle’s being here or there – is realized in its own separate, parallel universe. The universe we’re aware of at any given moment is but one of an infinite number in which every possible evolution allowed by quantum physics is separately realized. In this framework, it’s tempting to suggest that the freedom we feel to make this or that choice reflects the possibility we have to enter this or that parallel universe in a subsequent moment. Of course, since infinitely many copies of you and me are sprinkled across the parallel universes, the concepts of personal identity and free will need to be interpreted in this broadened context.”
Alastair Rae in Quantum Physics: Illusion or Reality?
“[Many Worlds] seems to be the only approach that treats the equations of quantum physics as a single universal theory of the physical world, capable of describing all phenomena from the smallest to the largest without further postulates – ‘cheap on assumptions’ even if ‘expensive on universes’.”
“The whole language of probability refers to alternatives: either something is going to happen or it is not, but in many-worlds everything occurs somewhere. Current work in this area aims to show that it is consistent to define something that appears like a probability to an observer about to undergo a branching event. If a convincing resolution to this problem can emerge and if, as Everett believed, it can be coupled with a derivation of the magnitudes of these probabilities without additional postulates, then I should feel forced to take this approach very seriously.”
Enrico Rodrigo in The Physics of Stargates
“[The Many Worlds interpretation] eliminates the measurement problem, because it is no longer necessary to attempt to determine when the state vector collapses. It never does. The problem of inapplicability to quantum cosmology also vanishes, because there is no longer a need for an external observer. Nor is there a need to construct an ensemble of universes. The multiverse itself serves this purpose. Quantum computation is no longer mysterious. Its parallel calculations occur within parallel universes. The ensemble of parallel universes results in the probabilistic character of the Copenhagen interpretation being retained for any particular observer, while the multiverse as a whole is fully determined.”
“In fact Many Worlds is the only interpretation of quantum theory that is uncontroversially known to be entirely free of inconsistencies. It, moreover, yields the advantage… of resolving all known time travel paradoxes.”
Jim Al-Khalili in Black Holes, Wormholes, and Time Machines
“The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics was proposed by an American physicist by the name of Hugh Everett III in the 1950s and, despite not catching on at the time, has recently been favoured by a growing number of cosmologists who feel it is the only viable interpretation when applying quantum mechanics to describe the whole Universe.”
“According to [David Deutsch], who takes the block universe idea literally in his book The Fabric of Reality, the Universe does not divide up into multiple copies of itself at the moment we are faced with a choice. Instead, there are already an infinite number of parallel universes out there. At the moment of choice we are just following one particular pathway, like a train going through a complicated junction. This means that the future is open since there are many options available to us, but so is the past. Our own spacetime is just one of an infinite number of pasts and futures. Travelling into the past in Deutsch’s multiverse is no different from the way we would normally get carried along into the future. We simply follow a time loop into one possible past.”
John Gribbin in Q is for Quantum
“Recently one group of scientists has taken the idea very seriously indeed. These are the cosmologists, who find that by using the many worlds interpretation they can get round the puzzle, which is insurmountable in the Copenhagen interpretation, of explaining what observation can collapse the wave function of the entire Universe and bring it into reality.”
“Apart from the cosmologists, the leading champion of the many worlds interpretation today is David Deutsch of the University of Oxford, who brings back on board some of Bohr’s ideas. On Deutsch’s picture, although two worlds exist while an electron is going through the experiment with two holes, the creation of the interference pattern involves electrons from both worlds somehow getting back together, with the two worlds fusing to make one reality, complete with an interference pattern.”
Bryce DeWitt in Science and Ultimate Reality
“Everett’s idea was simply to assume that quantum mechanics provides a description of reality in exactly the same sense as classical mechanics was once thought to do. This was a shocking idea, for it leads to a multiplicity of ‘realities.’ Few physicists in 1957 were prepared to accept it. And yet it can be shown to work.”
“The Everett interpretation does satisfy Occam’s principle in the sense that it keeps concepts to a minimum, taking the mathematical formalism as it stands without adding excess metaphysical baggage in the form of ‘collapsing wave functions’ or probabilities imposed from outside. The implications of this ‘bare bones’ interpretation are admittedly bizarre. But physicists have learned over the years that it is almost always rewarding to push any formalism (Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory, Einstein’s general relativity theory, quantum field theory) to its extreme logical conclusions.”
“The conventional probability interpretation of quantum mechanics emerges from the formalism itself and does not have to be imposed from outside. This fact is important when one adopts Everett’s view that the formalism corresponds directly to reality so that there is no room for a priori probabilistic concepts.”
“According to Everett the state vector does not really collapse, of course. Since the system and apparatus become correlated as a result of the first measurement it is not strictly possible to speak of the ‘state’ of the system independently of the apparatus. The state of the total system is always pure, and one can only say that the state of the subsystem S has become effectively a mixed state, i.e., described by a density operator.”
“It is astonishing that many cosmologists today are ready to entertain all sorts of ill-conceived notions about ‘many universes’ while ignoring Everett’s solidly grounded ideas.”
David Wallace in Many Worlds? Everett, Quantum Theory & Reality
“Quantum mechanics, taken literally, claims that we are living in a multiverse: that the world we observe around us is only one of countless quasiclassical universes (‘branches’) all coexisting.”
“If the fundamental dynamics are unitary, at the fundamental level there is no collapse of the quantum state. There is just a dynamical process – decoherence – whereby certain components of that state become dynamically autonomous of one another. Put another way: if each decoherent history is an emergent structure within the underlying microphysics, and if the underlying microphysics doesn’t do anything to prioritize one history over another (which it doesn’t) then all the histories exist. That is: a unitary quantum theory with emergent, decoherence-defined quasiclassical histories is a many-worlds theory.”
David Deutsch in Many Worlds? Everett, Quantum Theory & Reality
“It’s customary to say how astonishing that is – that we know of other universes and can reason about them, and have evidence of their attributes. But actually, by this time, the only astonishing thing is that that’s still controversial. After all, we know that no single-universe theory can explain even the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment, let alone, say, quantum computation. That is because any process (hidden variables, or whatever) that accounts for such phenomena must not only be exponentially more complex than everything that we see, but also contains many autonomous streams of information, each of which describes something resembling the universe as described by classical physics.”
“Insisting that parallel universes are ‘only an interpretation’ and not a – what? a scientifically established fact or something (as if there were such a thing) – has the same logic as those stickers that they paste in some American biology textbooks, saying that evolution is ‘only a theory’, by which they mean precisely that it’s just an ‘interpretation’.”
“The multiverse isn’t just a collection of universes. In fact universes, the things that historically nearly all the fuss has been about, are really just classical physics. A collection of classical universes – even if they slightly interact – is still classical. It doesn’t have entanglement; its elements don’t have phases to their amplitudes; it doesn’t have continuous motion of discrete observables; it doesn’t support quantum computation, and so on. It doesn’t even represent observables unless they’re diagonal, or near-diagonal, in the decoherence basis. Those are some of the properties that the multiverse has in addition to universes.”
“To build general quantum gates you need to be able to do more, and for universal quantum computation still more, such as error correction. And then it stops; then we have something universal. So, different kinds of information processing are possible in different kinds of multiverse region. Therefore, the understanding that’s currently being developed about these different kinds of computational resources is telling us about the structure of the multiverse.”
“The only way of understanding what’s really happening in quantum teleportation, and in the newly discovered, important processes of cluster/graph-quantum computation, is to apply Everett’s theory.”
“Everett’s theory, which is a completely deterministic theory of the multiverse without stochastic processes, determines what rational behaviour is for observers who bifurcate in the multiverse.”
Lev Vaidman in Many Worlds? Everett, Quantum Theory & Reality
“Quantum mechanics is an almost unprecedented success as a physical theory, yielding precise predictions for the results of experiments. However, if quantum theory is viewed as a direct description of physical reality, there is a significant difficulty: in order to explain particular outcomes of quantum measurements, a collapse of the quantum state has to be introduced. The collapse, with its randomness, non-locality and the lack of a well-defined moment of occurrence, is such an ugly scar on quantum theory, that I, along with many others, am ready to follow Everett and deny its existence. The price is the many-worlds interpretation (MWI), i.e., the existence of numerous parallel worlds.”
“At the beginning, according to the standard MWI, there was one classical state, common to all worlds. At a later time there are multiple classically described states. Each one corresponds to numerous worlds with identical pasts and different futures.”
“In a quantum experiment all outcomes are realized, and so the standard concept – the probability that one outcome happens and not the others – evaporates.”
Leonard Susskind in Why Does the World Exist?
“The many-worlds [multiverse] of Everett seems, at first sight, to be quite a different conception than the eternally-inflating universe. However, I think the two may really be the same thing.”
Victor Stenger in Quantum Gods
“Not only did Everett solve the problem of treating the observer and the observed as part of a single quantum system, he accounted for the statistical distribution of outcomes.”
“All possible worlds exist and all possible events take place somewhere. You and I live in one of the worlds with a particular series of measurement outcomes.”
“MWI helps us understand two-slit interference without the introduction of the wave-particle duality. In the particle picture, the photon or the electron must pass through one slit or the other, so there is no particle passing simultaneously through the other slit with which to interfere. In MWI, there is one world where the particle passes through one slit and another world where it passes through the second slit. As Everett found, the wave function of the detector is ‘entangled’ containing a piece for each world, and so the result of the measurement exhibits the interference between the two.”
“The different worlds in MWI are not independent of one another. They all connect at the point of measurement.”
“Human free will as we conceive it does not exist in many-worlds quantum mechanics. What we have is the appearance of free will in each of the different worlds, where chance seems to decide which path is followed.”
“In the many-worlds interpretation, all possibilities exist and so are predetermined. The apparent randomness and free will we see in a single world is an artifact.”
Frank Tipler in This Explains Everything
“The idea of the quantum computer is simple: since the analogues of ourselves in the parallel universes are interested in computing the same thing at the same time, why not share the computation between the universes? Let one of us do part of the calculation, another do another part, and so on with the final result being shared between us all.”
“The inability to predict the future state of our particular universe is not due to a lack of determinism in Nature, but rather due to the interaction of the other parallel universes with our own universe.”
“In fact, quantum mechanics is actually more deterministic than classical mechanics! It is possible to derive quantum mechanics mathematically from classical mechanics by requiring that classical mechanics be always deterministic – and also be composed of parallel universes.”
Additional References:
‘t Hooft’s quantum determinism — path integral viewpoint (Link)
A Local Deterministic Model of Quantum Spin Measurement (Link)
Anthropics Versus Determinism in Quantum Gravity (Link)
Approximate Decoherence of Histories and ‘t Hooft’s Deterministic Quantum Theory (Link)
Bell’s Theorem without Free Will (Link)
Bell’s Theorem, Many Worlds and Backwards-Time Physics: Not Just a Matter of Interpretation (Link)
Closed timelike curves, superluminal signals, and “free will” in universal quantum mechanics (Link)
Compact Time and Determinism for Bosons: foundations (Link)
Complex joint probabilities as expressions of determinism in quantum mechanics (Link)
de Broglie Deterministic Dice and emerging Relativistic Quantum Mechanics (Link)
Determinism and a supersymmetric classical model of quantum fields (Link)
Determinism and Dissipation in Quantum Gravity (Link)
Determinism beneath Quantum Mechanics (Link)
Determinism in Free Bosons (Link)
Discreteness and Determinism in Superstrings (Link)
Does Quantum Mechanics Save Free Will? (Link)
Duality between a deterministic cellular automaton and a bosonic quantum field theory in 1+1 dimensions (Link)
Entangled quantum states in a local deterministic theory (Link)
Generalizing Everett’s Quantum Mechanics for Quantum Cosmology (Link)
How Does God Play Dice? (Pre-)Determinism at the Planck Scale (Link)
Many lives in many worlds (Link)
Many Worlds in Context (Link)
Many worlds in one (Link)
Many-Worlds and Schroedinger’s First Quantum Theory (Link)
One more observational consequence of many-worlds quantum theory (Link)
Path Integral Approach to ‘t Hooft’s Derivation of Quantum from Classical Physics (Link)
Probability and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Theory (Link)
Quantum Behavior of Deterministic Systems with Information Loss. Path Integral Approach (Link)
Quantum Determinism from Quantum General Covariance (Link)
Quantum Gravity as a Dissipative Deterministic System (Link)
Quantum mechanical behaviour in a deterministic model (Link)
Quantum Mechanics and Determinism (Link)
Quantum mechanics and free will: counter-arguments (Link)
“Relative State” Formulation of Quantum Mechanics (Link)
Space-Time Uncertainty from Higher-Dimensional Determinism (or: How Heisenberg was right in 4D because Einstein was right in 5D) (Link)
The Free-Will Postulate in Quantum Mechanics (Link)
The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: Many Worlds or Many Words? (Link)
The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics: a fundamental exposition (Link)
The mathematical basis for deterministic quantum mechanics (Link)
The metron model. Towards a unified deterministic theory of fields and particles (Link)
The Principle of Sufficient Reason and Quantum Determinism (Link)
Updated 9/11/2012
