What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge

by Marcus du Sautoy

That said, there are a number of ways in which people have tried to overcome this apparently in-built uncertainty. One is the hypothesis that, at the point of observation, reality splits into a superposition of realities. In each reality the photon or the electron is located in a different position so that the wave in some sense doesn’t collapse but remains, describing the evolution of all these different realities. It’s just that, as conscious beings, we are now stuck in one of the realities and are unable to access the other realities in which the photon or electron ended up somewhere else on the photographic plate. This is a fascinating attempt to make sense of the physics. It is called the ‘many worlds’ interpretation and it was proposed in 1957 by American physicist Hugh Everett.