Duality Of Light: We discovered that all the small particles that collectively construct our world travel through space as probability waves. Instead of traveling from point A to point B like a thrown baseball, today we understand that light behaves in some ways like a solid particle when it interacts with other particles, however, when light travels from place to place, like a wave in an ocean it has no definite position. In fact, even matter particles, such as the particles that make up our bodies, regularly disappear between one position and the next.
Uncertainty Principle: One of the founders of quantum theory, Werner Heisenberg discovered what is now a key principle concerning all quantum behavior. As a particle gives up information about its location, information about its momentum is lost in equal measure. This is called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that both the position and momentum of a particle cannot be known. The more we know about one, the less we know about the other. So as a rule, whenever a particle assumes a precise position in reality, in that instant it has no momentum. And whenever a particle is moving from one place to another, it has no specific location. Only when the particle interacts with something else does it then establish which physical reality we will experience, but in between interactions the particle exists in another type of reality, a sort of multiplicity where all possibilities are combined together.
Quantum Theory Of Mechanics: Quantum theory was developed near the turn of the century and it wasn’t until 1957 that all the possibilities within each quantum wave led a young graduate student of physics named Hugh Everett III to produce the now famous Many-Worlds Theory as his doctorate thesis. Everett was a student of John Archibald Wheeler, the renowned American physicist and longtime Professor at Princeton. The Many-Worlds Theory makes the simple conclusion that one probabilistic outcome is as real as any other, predicting an immense surplus of many-worlds branch away from each moment of now.
Many Worlds: We can imagine an infinite number of copies identical to our present, but then in the next moment, in each copy there is one single particle that is in a slightly different position than all the others. The denser areas of probability in the interference pattern represent the more probable worlds, while the thin areas represent the least probable worlds. The areas outside the wave pattern that are completely dark can be thought of as worlds outside the realm of quantum possibility.
Reasonable Criticism: Some scientists shrug at the Many-Worlds Theory and continue to believe there is something that makes quantum reality operate only at the subatomic level, and not at a macrocosmic level where we live. But the technological applications of quantum mechanics to chemistry and electronics have already had a tremendous impact upon society. In addition to television shows and movies where characters cross over into parallel universes, physicists are working toward a complete quantum description of reality. If a complete theory is ever accomplished, it will explain why certain things are possible while others are less so, and it will tell us what is impossible. Presently, the Many-Worlds Theory does not claim that other worlds with different laws and forces of nature cannot exist, but if the probabilities of quantum mechanics were found to be basic to nature then we would reasonably conclude the same laws govern all of existence.
Troubled Private And Professional Life: Hugh Everett was a brilliant mathematician, an iconoclastic quantum theorist and later a successful defense contracter.
He introduced a new conception of reality to physics and influenced the course of world history: the man who invented a quantum theory of multiple universes.
After his new theory of multiple universes met scorn, Hugh Everett abandoned the world of academic physics. He turned to top secret military research and led a tragic private life.
To his children he was someone else again: an emotionally unavailable father; "a lump of furniture sitting at the dining room table", cigarette in hand. He was also a chain-smoking alcoholic who died prematurely in 1982 at the age of 51.
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