Related papers: Infinite multiverses and where to find them?
Why is it interesting to try to understand the origin of the universe? Everything we observe today, including our existence, arose from that event. Although we still do not have a theory that allows us to describe the origin itself, the…
Is there a single linearly evolving Wave Function of the Universe that is able to lead to all the nonlinearities we see around us? This proposal seems a priori highly implausible. I claim that instead, in the real Universe, generically only…
The notion that there are many "universes" with different properties is one answer to the question of "why is the universe so hospitable to life?" This notion also naturally follows from current ideas in eternal inflation and string/M…
The most striking observable feature of our indeterministic quantum universe is the wide range of time, place, and scale on which the deterministic laws of classical physics hold to an excellent approximation. This essay describes how this…
This introductory text on the basics of quantum mechanics is intended to serve as a kind of travel guide through the quantum world. It starts by asking whether quantum physics is important, or weird, or incomprehensible. It explains why…
Quantum mechanics---the theory describing the fundamental workings of nature---is famously counterintuitive: it predicts that a particle can be in two places at the same time, and that two remote particles can be inextricably and…
Quantum physics, which describes the strange behavior of light and matter at the smallest scales, is one of the most successful descriptions of reality, yet it is notoriously inaccessible. Here we provide an approachable explanation of…
There is a formal analogy between the evolution of the universe, when this is seen as a trajectory in the minisuperspace, and the worldline followed by a test particle in a curved spacetime. The analogy can be extended to the quantum realm,…
All investigators working on the foundations of quantum mechanics agree that the theory has profoundly modified our conception of reality. But there ends the consensus. The unproblematic formalism of the theory gives rise to a number of…
We study some collective phenomena that may happen in a multiverse scenario. First, it is posed an interaction scheme between universes whose evolution is dominated by a cosmological constant. As a result of the interaction, the value of…
Despite the unparalleled accuracy of quantum-theoretical predictions across an enormous range of phenomena, the theory's foundations are still in doubt. The theory deviates radically from classical physics, predicts counterintuitive…
A type of mechanics will be presented that possesses some distinctive properties. On the one hand, its physical description & rules of operation are readily comprehensible & intuitively clear. On the other, it fully satisfies all observable…
Popular multiverse models such as the one based on the string theory landscape require an underlying set of unexplained laws containing many specific features and highly restrictive prerequisites. I explore the consequences of relaxing some…
Despite the success of modern physics in formulating mathematical theories that can predict the outcome of experiments, we have made remarkably little progress towards answering the most fundamental question of: why is there a universe at…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
A minimal approach to the measurement problem and the quantum-to-classical transition assumes a universally valid quantum formalism, i.e. unitary time evolution governed by a Schr\"odinger-type equation. As had been pointed out long ago, in…
This paper is a response to some recent discussions of many-minds interpretations in the philosophical literature. After an introduction to the many-minds idea, the complexity of quantum states for macroscopic objects is stressed. Then it…
I make the case that the Universe according to unitary (no-collapse) quantum theory has a branching structure, and so can literally be regarded as a "many-worlds" theory. These worlds are not part of the fundamental ontology of quantum…
The path from understanding a simple reaction problem of scattering or tunneling to contemplating the quantum nuclear many-body system, where structure and continuum of reaction-states meet, overlap and coexist, is a complex and nontrivial…
The multiverse view in set theory, introduced and argued for in this article, is the view that there are many distinct concepts of set, each instantiated in a corresponding set-theoretic universe. The universe view, in contrast, asserts…