Parallel universes exist - study

[MaxWeiss]

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I must confess that I never really liked the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory -- it has always seemed very extravagant to me, seeming to introduce an infinity of parallel realities "just for the fun of it" (i.e. the math lets you interpret it that way if you want to, but it doesn't seem to care if you do it that way or not). There are quite a few physicists that typically take this point of view -- why invoke an infinite number of parallel universes if you don't have to?

The interesting thing, though, is that in my own research I ended up building a formalism (for generally covariant quantum theory) that, once complete, simultaneously has a realist interpretation and a branching structure. I certainly wasn't looking for this kind of thing -- I was mainly just trying to build something that was completely general and reproduced known physics in the known limit. But the most straightforward interpretation looks suspiciously many worldsish -- people have, in fact, commented to me that "you are saying there is physical meaning to all the branches ... you seem to get back to a many worlds version."

So I'm now in a strange position of being forced to take this interpretation somewhat more seriously than I have in the past. I'd be perfectly happy if I could come up with an interpretation of my own formalism that gets rid of the parallel worlds, but I'm not sure that I can!

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Holy [censored], that's fascinating!!! Updates when you get them please!..