by Scott Hoge
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Science is a beautiful art of finding theories. In the past, all have been mathematical. If you look around, you will notice the beautiful proportion, the splendor of orderly perfection in the laws of nature and in all its phenomena. So it is down to the very last atom. The first attempt to find a systematic theory of the behavior of the entire universe was made in the late 17th century by Isaac Newton, who invented calculus for that very aim. Newton's theory described a perfectly flat universe, the four-dimensional analogue of a piece of paper, in which the 'objective present' had a meaning and a duration of time could be measured between any two events in history.
All that changed in the early 20th century when the newer and more accurate Theory of Relativity was discovered by Albert Einstein, who replaced flat space with curved space and the 'objective present' with light cones. His theory predicted that nothing could travel outside a light cone and that the laws did not allow for an objective space axis, resulting in phenomena like contracting rods, slowing clocks and mass-energy equivalence. Although relativity was counterintuitive, it described a universe that was geometrically and logically sound.
An even newer revolution occured in the theory of quantum mechanics, in which entities like photons behave like waves until the moment of observation, at which a wave would appear to be reduced by laws of probability to having traveled one particle path or another. Some had trouble accepting this theory because it appeared to give us 'magic eyes' that influenced waves to behave probabilistically, eliminating certainty of prediction and granting the observer privileged status over the rest of the matter of the universe without explaining how or why.
In response to this, several solutions were proposed. One was 'objective wavefunction collapse,' which asserted that human consciousness did indeed have a privileged place in the world. Another was that no objective inferences should be made from the predictions of quantum mechanics. Still another, many-worlds, asserted that waves do not transform at all: just as they have noncurvilinear paths through space, so the observer ripples into copies of himself or herself, as if into higher dimensions, no world immediately accesible to another and each containing an outcome of the observation.
This no-wavefunction-collapse interpretation is consistent with an implication of Daniel Dennett's theory that there is no 'finish line' at which information processed by the brain suddenly enters into consciousness.
What is beautiful about the many-worlds interpretation is that the determinism of objective certainty is restored in a crystallized and elegant conception of the universe as a complete and perfect mathematical object -- one in which the irregularity of the distribution of matter is reduced to regularity in the symmetry of all worlds.
It appears to explain how life can arise by coincidence. Of the profoundly numerous alternative histories of this universe, one of them must surely support life: a world in which we naturally and predictably find ourselves. Perhaps even a great deal of coincidences form the underpinning of our consciousness in this branch of the wavefunction.
A proponent of many-worlds may compare this model of the universe to a full set of branches in a tree or the unobstructed flow of a pond ripple in all directions.
Opponents of many-worlds have charged the interpretation with violating Occam's razor in postulating unnecessary entities, while defenders have made the same objection to wavefunction collapse, accusing it of postulating an unnecessary axiom. We must remember that some have claimed that speculating about the objective world is misguided and will lead us nowhere.
Some, notably Roger Penrose, have raised considerable objections on the grounds that many-worlds would be too computable to explain human consciousness. Such arguments rest on Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and may be found here: Quantum Consciousness.
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