|Multiple Universes Interpretation|
It doesn't take a doctorate in astrophysics on this one (I'm an applied historian) to shout that the emperor has no clothes. So what are multiverse or many-worlds theorists saying and more importantly what are they hiding from? Professor Hugh Everetts who advocated the "many worlds interpretation" (MWI) of quantum mechanics has used dice to illustrate his theory. What happens when a six-sided die is thrown? According to the many-world's interpretation, all six possible ways the die can fall correspond to six different universes. But my problem with this notion is that on a subatomic, quantum mechanical level it is not just the one die generating six universes, but the trillions of atoms that make up that one die, each collapsing to form as many realities or universes as the number of subatomic particles in each of the dice.
Nuclear physicists have long labored over the question of how does the huge number of possible actions available to a subatomic particle congeal into the one action recorded by an observer. Advocates of MWI would say that each possible wavelength collapses or branches into a subatomic particle in its own universe. But isn't this just a convoluted way of trying to erase the question of consciousness? That is, might it be the consciousness of living organisms, or maybe even a conscious universe itself that collapses the wave function?
Different theories relating to this "quantum mind-body problem" have been promulgated beginning as far back as 1932 when John von Neumann wrote The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. His "Von Neumann chain," asserts that the collapse of the wave function can be placed at any position in the causal chain from the measurement device to the "subjective perception" of the human observer. In many philosophies, the conscious mind is considered to be a separate entity, existing in a parallel realm not described by physical law. Some people claim that this idea gains support from the description of the physical world provided by quantum mechanics. Parallels between quantum mechanics and mind/body dualism (the notion that the conscious mind is a separate entity from the world it observes) have over the decades been advocated by such scientists as Erwin Schrödinger,Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr, and Eugene Wigner. My favorite scientific authors who have written popular books on the subject are Robert Lanza, author of Biocentrism, and Amit Goswami, who wrote The Self-Aware Universe.
If physicists are having trouble explaining the one universe in which we live, they ought to stay away from speculation positing the existence of an astronomical number of universes created with each subatomic action of my fingers tapping this computer keyboard.