"James P. Hogan - Giants 5 - Mission to Minerva" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

because it was everything at once; the reason it didn't appear that way was
that everyday awareness only apprehends a small part of it.

According to the picture that finally emerged, neither an energized atom nor
an impinging photon "chooses" one state from an ensemble of possible
statesтАФthus provoking endless debates about how, when, and why it gets to make
that choice; every possibility is actualizedтАФbut each in its own separate
reality, which then continues to evolve the various consequences of the
particular alternative that led to it. The various realities all contain
versions of their inhabitants that are consistent with the unfolding of events
making up that reality, remaining unaware of all the rest. The dice thrower in
one reality rolls a boxcar, double six, breaks the bank, and retires rich; his
counterpart in another of the thirty-six possible two-die variants rolls
zilch, loses his shirt, and jumps off a bridge. This formed the essence of the
Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Many popular accounts talked about the universe "splitting" into alternative
forms, with notions of what constituted a branch point varying from "every
quantum interaction" to any event deemed sufficiently significant by
humansтАФthe realities continuing thereafter to exist adjacently but separate
and discrete, somewhat like the pages of a book. Hence the term "parallel
universe." But while perhaps more easy to visualize, this did not accurately
capture the strange state of affairs that the formulators of the MWI were
proposing. New universes didn't spring into existence out of nothing every
time some kind of decision was called for, anymore than New York or Boston
suddenly materializes in response to a driver's going right or left at a
junction in the highway. They were there already and always had been, just
like all the other possible destinations on the road map.

In a similar kind of way, not only all the futures that could possibly arise
from a given "now," but all the different "nows" that could have come about,
existed as parts of an immense, branching totality, all of it equally real.
Within it, every quantum alternative led to a unique consequent reality which
in that detail at least differed from all the rest. Rather than resembling a
stack of pages, its nature was more that of a continuum of change existing in
as many directions as change was possible. The kind of change depended on the
direction taken, occurring sometimes gradually, sometimes abruptly. Every
conceivable way in which one world could differ from another therefore
corresponded to an axis of change within the continuum, endowing it with an as
good as infinite number of dimensions. The totality itself was unchanging and
timeless. The phenomenon of time measured by physics arose as a construct of
the event sequence that arose from tracing a particular path through the tree
of branching alternatives. Every such path defined its own discrete reality,
or "universe." The perception of time emerged from a consciousness following
such a path through the alternatives that it encountered. Exactly how was
something that the physicists left to philosophers, theologians, and mystics
to explain.

The normal "forward" flow of experience within a universe ran up the tree of
branching time lines. Direct knowledge of the other realities existing to the