I like hearing about new and interesting ideas within science – they help us to explain our world better…

(And now, I step on my soapbox…)  HOWEVER, I do think some ideas are just plain hooey, because they are less science and more intellectual rationalization for why we can’t explain things at the moment…

Take the Many-Worlds interpretation. 

In quantum mechanics, particles in the universe are represented by things called wavefunctions.  These wavefunctions describe the probabilities that one would observe a particle in a particular state, for example.  However, once we observe the particle in some state, we observe that state and no others, so the quantum physicists describe this as the “collapse” of the wavefunction.

Describing particles this way turns out to be pretty useful in describing some overall behavior, but it doesn’t explain everything, and this is where the “hooey” starts coming in…

Because quantum physicists can’t understand why this “collapse” happens the way it does, they’ve started to come up with consequences that just plain boggle the mind… 

So, since particles are represented by probabilitistic wavefunctions, then some people in the Many Worlds camp think that these particles exist in all states in different proportions in different universes.  So there’s another you somewhere doing something different than you’re doing now (say, not reading this post…) and still others doing things completely different…

The possibilities are literally endless, and there are serious scientists who believe in this hooey with straight faces…

Here’s a link to a video of David Deutsch.  He’s a Dirac Prize winner and in important contributor to the field of quantum mechanics and quantum computation (a favorite subject of mine…).  However, I just don’t buy into this poppycock of multiple universes – it’s hard enough to figure out what’s going on in our  universe, let alone all the other infinitely possible ones… 

And to invent an infinite number of alternative universes as the reason why we can’t fully explain what’s happening here – well, it just plain ain’t science.

For me, scientific theories are ones that can (1) explain the world and the universe around us, and (2) can be proven wrong when it doesn’t explain what happens in our world.   Theories also provide evidence for their truth with each and every time we observe our world. 

The problem with some theories (Many-Worlds is one, String Theory is another…) is that they can’t be proven wrong, so they just hang around, and scientific debate turns more into philosophy than a quest for what really drives the universe…

OK, off the soapbox…  For now…