The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

by David Deutsch

Thanks to the strong internal interference that it is continuously undergoing, a typical electron is an irreducibly multiversal object, and not a collection of parallel-universe or parallel-histories objects.

has multiple positions and multiple speeds without being divisible into autonomous sub-entities each of which has one speed and one position.

reality is an electron field throughout the whole of space, and disturbances spread through this field as waves,...

There is a field (or ‘waves’) in the multiverse for every individual particle that we observe in a particular universe.

every atom in an everyday object is a multiversal object, not partitioned into nearly autonomous instances and nearly autonomous histories, yet everyday objects such as starships and betrothed couples, which are made of such particles, are partitioned very accurately into nearly autonomous histories with exactly one instance, one position, one speed of each object in each history.

the larger and more complex an object or process is, the less its gross behaviour is affected by interference.

next thing that happens is that they cease to be fungible, splitting through their interaction with atoms at their points of arrival into a finite but huge number of instances, each of which is the origin of a separate history.

In each such history, there is an autonomous instance of the cosmic-ray particle, which will dissipate its energy in creating a ‘cosmic-ray shower’ of electrically charged

particles. Thus, in different histories, such a shower will occur at different locations. In some, that shower will provide a conducting path down which a lightning bolt will travel. Every atom on the surface of the Earth will be struck by such ligh...

particles will strike a human cell, damaging some already damaged DNA in such a way as t...

there is only a probability of one in a trillion trillion that interference will be suppressed.

This is considerably lower than the probability that the experiment will

give inaccurate results due to imperfect measuring instruments, or that it will be spoi...

What is the atom like halfway through the process? Its instances are still fungible, but now half of them are in the ground state and half in the excited state.

This also raises the issue of whether time itself is a continuous

variable.

However, the quantum mechanics of time is not yet fully understood, and will not be until we have a quantum theory of gravity (the unification of quantum theory with the genera...

things are not as simpl...

different times are a special case of diffe...

All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.

In reality, misleading observations, misleading memories and false interpretations are common even in the mainstreams of history. We have to work hard to avoid fooling ourselves with them.

For example, there are certain molecules that exist in

two or more structures at once (a ‘structure’ being an arrangement of atoms, held together by chemical bonds). Chemists call this phenomenon ‘resonance’ between the two structures, but the molecule is not alternating between them: it has them simultaneously.

when a ‘resonant’ molecule participates in a chemical reaction with other molecules, there is quantum interference.

Quantum theory was discovered independently by two physicists who reached it from different directions: Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger.

Schrödinger equation, which is a way of expressing the quantum-mechanical laws of motion.

both explained motion, especially within atoms, in new and astonishingly counter-intuitive ways. Heisenberg’...

variables of a particle do not have numerical values. Instead, they are matrices: large arrays of numbers which are related in complicated, probabilistic ways to the...

we now know that that multiplicity of information exists because a variable has different values for different instance...

‘elements of reality’. The Schrödinger equation, when

such waves describe what proportion of the instances of each particle are in each region of space, and also the entanglement information among the particles.

whenever a measurement is made, all the histories but one cease to exist.

most of the theoretical-physics community retreated rapidly and with remarkable docility into instrumentalism. If the predictions work, they reasoned, why worry about the explanation?

both versions of quantum theory were clearly describing some sort of physical process that brought about the outcomes of experiments.

‘particle–wave duality’: the photon is both an extended (non-zero volume) and a localized (zero-volume) object at the same time, and one can choose to observe either attribute but not both.

‘It is both a wave and a particle simultaneously.’

There the idea is that quantum physics defies the very foundations of reason: particles have mutually exclusive attributes, period.

consciousness was said to be acting at a fundamental level in physics.

Few physicists claimed to understand it. None did, and so students’ questions were met with such nonsense as ‘If you think you’ve understood quantum mechanics then you don’t.’

Schrödinger

when his equation seems to be describing several different histories, they are ‘not alternatives but all really happen simultaneously’. This is the earliest known reference to the multiverse.

During the twentieth century, anti-realism became almost universal among philosophers, and common among scientists. Some denied that the physical world exists at all, and most felt obliged to admit that, even if it does, science has no access to it.

behaviourism,

downplay explanation in favour of stimulus-response rules of thumb.

will (probably) be cannot possibly take account of the effects of knowledge-creation.

to whatever extent knowledge-creation is involved, the theory is prophecy, and will therefore be biased towards pessimism.

Behaviouristic studies of human psychology must, by their nature, lead to dehumanizing theor...

The substance of scientific theories is explanation, and explanation of errors constitutes most of the content of the design of any non-trivial scientific experiment.

Bad philosophy cannot easily be countered by good philosophy – argument and explanation – because it holds itself immune.

But it can be countered by progress.