I'm a fan of pop sci books having recently enjoyed books like Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman, The Particle Zoo by Gavin Hesketh and Reality Is Not What Is Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli.This book has been a disappointment, or perhaps even worse: an annoyance!I don't know if it's the author or the subject matter. I already have a pretty good understanding of our current view of Quantum Physics and I did my best to come to this book and the Many Worlds theory with an open mind.The author claims Many Worlds proponents are taking what has become an almost taboo subject: understanding the MEANING of Quantum world. He complains that for a long time the accepted practice in the physics world has been to simply accept quantum theory's incredible accuracy and reliability and just Shut up and Calculate without looking deeper. He claims Many Worlds does this but I don't see much evidence of it.Instead, Many Worlds takes the fundamental equations from quantum theory and strips them back to the bare essentials of the Schrodinger Equation. No exceptions or special cases or unexplained reasons for the apparent collaps of the quantum wave function or electrons deciding.What is the cost for such streamlined, elegant, pure maths? Nothing less than entire universes being created with every single quantum wave collapse! Nothing major.These other worlds unobservable copies of the universe millions, trillions of them coming into existence every second the author then repeatedly treats these entire universes as being no big deal and easily ignored. They don't matter, they are irrelevant to us. The millions of versions of me, differing only by an electron here or there they're not the real me. Me in this world is me and the other copies are someone else.On the question of the splitting of the universe upon every quantum decision a local or non local event? Does it propagate at the speed of light or does it happen everywhere at once? The answer: Whatever is convenient for you it's not really a relevant question because, you see, the Schrodinger Equation is satisfied and the quantum wave function continues.About a quarter of the way through I started to get irked by the author flicking away questions like these with what I belive are poor arguments. By half way through I'm starting to view the author like a Flat Earther who believes what they believe without ever being able to convince me because they are coming from a different set of basic beliefs. The quantum wave function is preserved, the maths is pure. They can happily shut up and calculate and to me, haven't really answered anything.I came with the best open mind I could, but I'm left thinking Many Worlds is simply rubbish. Maybe a different author could explain it better. Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime Gran divulgador. Sus libros nunca defraudan. Buena lectura para intentar comprender la física cuàntica. Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime I am not a physicist, just a 75 year old retiree with an interest in science. I have read all Sean Carroll’s books and “Something Deeply Hidden” is without doubt his pièce de résistance. The book explains in an intelligible way a deeply complex theory and anyone interested in how the physical world may work will enjoy it immensely. No doubt a few theoretical physicists will take issue with some of the book’s details but for people like me it is a masterpiece. Thank you, Sean Carroll, for stepping outside of the academic bubble and taking the time to entertain and inform the rest of us (again!). Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime The book needs organisation and thought. Clearly the author was paid by the word, as it is over verbose, and at times, the topics merge together in the reader's brain, causing a fog. I would have liked a multi page summary table at the start, itemising & classifying every theory, together with summaries of their key features, strengths and weaknesses. The summary should also itemise what predictions each theory has made, and the numerical accuracy of each prediction against experiment. Without this, it is just so much waffle.The author is obsessed with the Multi Worlds theory. If I think about tossing a coin 6 times, I can draw a tree diagram showing every possible permutation, but I do not think that the universe has split into 2 universes at each toss. The author also talks about the wave function of the whole universe, which is rather meaningless.Sadly, physics is political, where different theories have become religions, which seems to be an excuse for a lack of understanding. The research that gets funded is heavily influenced by tribal groups, which is wrong for what should be a science. Maybe that explains the lack of progress in the area. Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime Full of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, this makes an otherwise interesting book difficult to read. Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA Science Newsfavorite science book of As you read these words, copies of you are being created Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist and one of this worlds most celebrated writers on science, rewrites the history of th century physics Already hailed as a masterpiece, Something Deeply Hidden shows for the first time that facing up to the essential puzzle of quantum mechanics utterly transforms how we think about space and time His reconciling of quantum mechanics with Einsteins theory of relativity changes, well, everything Most physicists havent even recognized the uncomfortable truth physics has been in crisis since Quantum mechanics has always had obvious gapswhich have come to be simply ignored Science popularizers keep telling us how weird it is, how impossible it is to understand Academics discourage students from working on the dead end of quantum foundations Putting his professional reputation on the line with this audacious yet entirely reasonable book, Carroll says that the crisis can now come to an end We just have to accept that there is than one of us in the universe There are many, many Sean Carrolls Many of every one of us Copies of you are generated thousands of times per second The Many Worlds Theory of quantum behavior says that every time there is a quantum event, a world splits off with everything in it the same, except in that other world the quantum event didnt happen Step by step in Carrolls uniquely lucid way, he tackles the major objections to this otherworldly revelation until his case is inescapably established Rarely does a book so fully reorganize how we think about our place in the universe We are on the threshold of a new understandingof where we are in the cosmos, and what we are made of Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime
Over the past decade or so Sean Carroll has gained a worthy reputation as one of the best communicators in his sphere of scientific research (cosmology and quantum theory), and his recent books bear testament to this, being among the most comprehensible in print at the present time. Something Deeply Hidden is particularly valuable in that it explains, in the clearest terms, one of the most misunderstood and tantalising (if not to say downright weird) theories in quantum mechanics the somewhat misnamed Many Worlds interpretation.Whilst Carroll makes no bones about the fact that this is his preferred theory, he also offers a fair and easily understandable overview of the alternative interpretations, so the book does a very good job at presenting the most credible options that are available at the present time.I must confess to having been a complete sceptic as to the plausibility of the Many Worlds interpretation before reading this marvellous tome, but it has at least partly shifted my perspective and I now consider the theory as at least a viable contender, somewhat credible than the instantaneous collapse of the wave function variants which most people seem to believe in.As in his excellent series of MindScape podcasts (which I also highly recommend), Carroll takes some incredibly abstuse concepts and makes them comprehensible to just about anyone with an enquiring mind and a willingness to engage with some of the most fantastic concepts the human mind has so far had to ponder. With so few practicising scientists even remotely interested in the foundations of quantum mechanics and all too willing to regard it as a black box Carroll does an excellent job in reminding us that quantum theory still contains within it some very profound mysteries and that much work has yet to be done if we are to understand exactly what quantum mechanics is. It's a sobering thought that our entire civilisation, our entire technological revolution appears to be based on an area of science that has the flimsiest of foundations and which no one really understands Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime
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