Proof that Multiverse Equals Many Worlds

Here's a new paper announced at Cornell Universeity's arxiv.org which has just been published by two highly respected physicists: Leonard Susskind and Raphael Bousso. It confirms an idea I've been promoting for so long that it feels a little strange to me to see them discussing this as something new, but nonetheless this is exciting news. Over at MIT's Technology Review site, here's a link to an article published today about Bousso and Susskind's paper: it's titled Multiverse = Many Worlds, Say Physicists.

The illustration at left is shown in that article, no explanation is attached but the name of the picture is "Multiverse QM". QM, of course, is quantum mechanics, and as it turns out the illustration comes from page 22 of Bousso and Susskind's paper. The idea shown here, that our reality is constantly branching, and that those branches are causally interconnected in multiple ways, has always been an important part of my approach to visualizing the dimensions. 

What is still notably missing from this new paper is the acceptance that these branches are occurring at the fifth dimension, where the field effects for gravity and light are resolved. Until that idea moves into the mainstream, there will still be disagreement as to the relevance of my approach to visualizing the extra dimensions... but this paper certainly helps my project's inch by inch progress from the lunatic fringe towards the accepted picture of the underlying "information equals reality" nature of our universe or any other.

Here's a few select paragraphs from the MIT article, please click on the following links to read the full article, read the arxiv.org posting, or download the pdf of the paper:

Today, Leonard Susskind at Stanford University in Palo Alto and Raphael Bousso at the University of California, Berkeley, put forward the idea that the multiverse and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics are formally equivalent. But there is a caveat. The equivalence only holds if both quantum mechanics and the multiverse take special forms.

They call this new idea the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics.

That's something worth pondering for a moment. Bousso and Susskind are two of the world's leading string theorists (Susskind is credited as the father of the field), so their ideas have an impeccable pedigree.

...what this new approach does have is a satisfying simplicity-- it's neat and elegant that the many worlds and the multiverse are equivalent. William of Ockham would certainly be pleased and no doubt, many modern physicists will be too.

"A satisfying simplicity... neat and elegant": that's also what people like about my approach to visualizing the dimensions. I'm always excited when I see ways in which the ideas I arrived at through intuition and imagination are now being confirmed with proofs by great minds such as these. As I've said all along, I believe there's an underlying truth which connects these many schools of thought together, and today is an important step in that journey.

Are you enjoying the journey?

Rob Bryanton

Next: Poll 77 - What if the World's a Simulation?