How to Live Safely in a Science Fictiona (2010) (26 page)
Read How to Live Safely in a Science Fictiona (2010) Online
Authors: Charles Yu
Unincorporated region between SF and reality, in close proximity to Charles Yu’s childhood home.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ4nwTTmcgs
A YouTube video on time travel from an alien universe. Concepts may not apply in MU-31.
The park where my father attempted to sell his time machine prototype.
As the theory of the atom, quantum mechanics is perhaps the most successful theory in the history of science. It enables physicists, chemists, and technicians to calculate and predict the outcome of a vast number of experiments and to create new and advanced technology based on the insight into the behavior of atomic objects. But it is also a theory that challenges our imagination. It seems to violate some fundamental principles of classical physics, principles that eventually have become a part of western common sense since the rise of the modern worldview in the Renaissance. So the aim of any metaphysical interpretation of quantum mechanics is to account for these violations.
The Copenhagen interpretation was the first general attempt to understand the world of atoms as this is represented by quantum mechanics. The founding father was mainly the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, but also Werner Heisenberg, Max Born and other physicists made important contributions to the overall understanding of the atomic world that is associated with the name of the capital of Denmark.
(
plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-copenhagen
)
The fundamental idea of the MWI is that there are myriads of worlds in the Universe in addition to the world we are aware of. In particular, every time a quantum experiment with different outcomes with non-zero probability is performed, all outcomes are obtained, each in a different world, even if we are aware only of the world with the outcome we have seen. In fact, quantum experiments take place everywhere and very often, not just in physics laboratories: even the irregular blinking of an old fluorescent bulb is a quantum experiment.
(
plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds
/)
