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Articles

The Many Worlds of David Deutsch

Why do some physicists now believe that there are many parallel universes very like our own? And if there are, how will this help us build faster computers?

Quantum mechanics was developed in the early years of the 20th century. Starting with the discovery that energy cannot come in infinitely small amounts but comes in discrete packets or quanta, an elaborate mathematical structure was worked out which successfully predicted a very wide range of physical phenomena. The years went by and more and more experimental evidence piled up to attest to the theory’s extraordinary accuracy. However, the theory was very mathematical, and it was not clear what exactly it meant in physical terms – and thus what its predictive success told us about the physical nature of the universe. All the physical interpretations put forward have been shockingly counterintuitive.

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