Sliced, not Splitted: a Better Alternative to Many-Worlds?

Abstract

The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics is currently experiencing a popular resurgence, propelled by such prominent and articulate physicists as Sean Carroll, David Deutsch, Max Tegmark, and Lev Vaidman. The consequences of MWI are mind-boggling: the spacetime universe of our experience is only one branch of an unimaginably fast-multiplying plethora of alternative universes held incommunicado. In this paper, we propose that the mass of Medusa's hair served up by MWI is due to a failure to embed the spacetime universe in the right space: spacetime is a slice of bread, not a splitting strand of pasta. By way of motivation, we first give a very simple presentation of Bell's inequality by comparing it to a ``quantum game show'', followed by a simple description of Aspect's 1985 experiment involving entangled photons which confirms the inequality. We interpret the paradoxical correlation between measurements as resulting from a process outside of spacetime that produces both the original entanglement and the measurements. This is followed by a brief presentation of MWI, and then by a pictorial comparison of the proposed process model and MWI. The final section lists a number of potential consequences of the model related to causality, determinism, free will, and consciousness, and points to further references that give a more in-depth and rigorous presentation of the process dimension model. The entire article is non-technical and requires no mathematical background other than high school mathematics and an understanding of basic concepts in probability. The physics involved in Aspect's experiment is also explained.