A team of scientists from the U.S. and Australia have proposed a new idea suggesting that parallel universes do exist, and that they interact with one another.
The scientists, including Professor Howard Wiseman, Dr. Michael Hall, and Dr. Dirk-Andre Deckert, propose that our universe is just one of a large number of parallel worlds, each as real as the other. More importantly, they also suggest that the quantum phenomena we observe is the result of a subtle “universal force of repulsion” between our universe and other nearby (or “similar”) universes.
They call their idea “Many Interacting Worlds.”
“Our ‘many-interacting-worlds’ approach hinges on the assumption that interactions between deterministically evolving worlds cause all quantum effects. Each world is simply the position of particles in three-dimensional space, and each would evolve according to Newton’s laws if there were no interworld interactions.
A surprising feature of our approach is that the formulation contains nothing that corresponds to the mysterious quantum wave function, except in the formal mathematical limit in which the number of worlds becomes infinitely large. Conversely, Newtonian mechanics corresponds to the opposite limit of just one world. Thus, our approach incorporates both classical and quantum theory. We perform numerical simulations and show that our approach can reproduce interference with a double slit. As few as two interacting worlds can result in quantumlike effects, such as tunneling through a barrier.”
“In the well-known ‘Many Worlds Interpretation,’ each universe branches into a bunch of new universes every time a quantum measurement is made,” says Wiseman, “All possibilities are therefore realised — in some universes the dinosaur-killing asteroid missed Earth. In others, Australia is colonised by the Portuguese. But critics question the reality of these other universes, since they do not influence our universe at all. On this score, our ‘Many Interacting Worlds’ approach is completely different, as its name implies.”
You can read their press release here, or check out the complete text of their paper titled Quantum Phenomena Modeled by Interactions between Many Classical Worlds, published in the journal Physical Review X last month.
