On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory

by Thomas Hertog

Mathematically speaking, Everett’s scheme is supremely elegant: The Schrödinger equation rules. Universally. Everett’s framework demonstrates that Bohr’s classical packaging is excess baggage that can be dispensed with. The interactive process whereby subsystems get entangled, causing the universal wave function to divide into separate, decoherent branches that are mutually invisible, offers an extremely satisfying microscopic description of quantum measurements. Human consciousness, human experimenters, and human observations are neither completely irrelevant in Everett’s scheme nor regarded as separate external entities, obeying different rules. They are simply treated as part of the broader quantum mechanical environment, not fundamentally different from air molecules and photons. Everett put forward an inside-out way of thinking about the quantum world. He showed that we can be riding the universal quantum wave, not just watching from the shoreline.