Readers of the Middle Way will be interested to hear about some ideas which have been current in some sections of the physics community for half a century, but which have been little reported. The ideas change the western world view in a more profound way than any of the paradigm-shifts of science in the past. It is for this very reason that they are the subject of coffee-room talk, not funded research.

This paper will outline this set of ideas, the core of which was proposed by Hugh Everett III in his 1957 paper, ‘The Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics’. It will go on to discuss the equivalence of the Everett ontology and Buddhist metaphysics. Before doing so, it is necessary to provide some more background to what is an ongoing debate.

The discovery of the quantum nature of matter left the physics community of the 1920s in a state of profound shock. It was, and is, not possible to reconcile the observed facts with a universe which is remotely Newtonian. All of the competing interpretations still force us to abandon one or more cherished idea: time, locality, identity.

The fundamental problem in quantum physics can be illuminated by a candle. As a candle emits a single photon (a particle of light), a scientist can determine with extraordinary precision its probability of being in any one place. A probability ‘wavefunction’ is said to emanate from the source, and the photon can be anywhere allowed by that wavefunction. The details are computed by the celebrated Schrödinger equation. The problem comes when you observe the photon, and discover where it actually is. At this moment, the wavefunction ‘collapses’ from a cloud around the candle to a single point. This has led to a large number of metaphysical speculations. How does the wavefunction ‘know’ it is being looked at? How can quantum mechanics be formulated without recourse to the idea of the conscious observer, outside the system, initiating that collapse? This is the problem.

In 1927, at the Solvay Conference, Niels Bohr succeeded in constructing an orthodoxy (the Copenhagen interpretation) which allowed physicists to continue building their armoury of quantum mechanical techniques, while avoiding the frightening questions of what actually happens. He simply said that it was meaningless to give a photon spatial attributes until the wavefunction collapse. This developed into the creed of logical positivism, adherents of which argue it is meaningless to discuss anything which cannot produce concrete experimental results. Positivism is still a major factor in the teaching of physics; students are still told to ‘shut up and calculate’ rather than inquire after meaning.

The most intuitively accessible description of the problem is the famous Schrödinger cat. In this thought experiment, a cat is placed in a sealed box, along with a radioactive source. The source is set to open a bottle of cyanide if it decays. There is a 50% chance of the source decaying in the minute while the box is closed, so there is a 50% chance of us seeing a live cat when the box is opened. But, according to Bohr, it does not make sense to ask what happens before we make the observation (open the box). The Copenhagen interpretation would have us believe that the cat is in a ‘superposition’ of the alive and dead states while the box is closed, and only becomes actually dead or alive when we open the box to make our observation.

This, and various other paradoxes, have led wayward physicists to question the orthodoxy and try to develop interpretations which resolve the problems. Because this will not affect how physicists do quantum physics, this endeavour is called metaphysics. Few respectable physicists will lend their name to such a project. Notable exceptions include Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics (based on Bohm’s pilot wave); Henry Stapp’s papers deriving consciousness from quantum mechanics (based on Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation), and David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality (based on Everett).

Nevertheless, the icons of Newtonian physics are crumbling. It is widely acknowledged that time can no longer be considered an objective feature of reality (Barbour, Price, Stenger), or at least its direction of travel is arbitrary. But the Everett ‘many worlds interpretation’, or MWI, goes much further. It implies that nothing is objective. Everything exists, and what you see in the plenitude is a function of how far you restrict your view.

Everett simply posited that there is no wavefunction collapse. In other words, the photon is emitted every which way simultaneously; the cat is alive and dead at the same time; a pencil balanced on its point will fall in all directions at once. We only see one result, instead of all of them, because we observe a single path through an ever-branching multitude of infinite universes, and we call that path ‘our universe’. The process of splitting is called ‘decoherence’.

According to Everett’s MWI, the universe is branching off every Planck Time (10^-43 seconds) into countless billions of other universes, each an unmoving snapshot in time, and each branching out in turn. So as you turn the page in ‘this universe’, you go out for a cup of tea in many others. When you roll a die, all numbers come up. In billions of universes, you roll a six; in billions more, you get a one. In some universes, the die turns into a diamond. None of these events contradicts any known laws of physics. As the probability of anything happening is always one (it will happen), Everett used the term, ‘measure’ to describe the relative proportions of events. For example, the measure of dice showing one to five is five times the measure of dice showing six, although there are infinitely many universes corresponding to either category. David Deutsch calls the infinite ensemble of snapshot universes the ‘multiverse’.

MWI is not the orthodoxy of the physics community, but neither is any competing ontology. It makes precisely the same predictions for the results of experiments as the Copenhagen or any other interpretation. When positivism is accepted as the way to do science, anything that is ‘not even wrong’ is widely ignored. Nevertheless, various polls of leading physicists have concluded that, when pressed for an answer, more believe MWI than anything else.

There are better reasons for supposing that MWI is true. They centre on the principle of ‘Ockham’s Razor’, which states that the simplest theory compatible with the facts is the one we should choose. Superficially, we should choose the MWI because it gives the same results as the Copenhagen Interpretation, without the need for an observer-induced ‘wavefunction collapse’. But more profoundly, the MWI makes the world we observe compatible with a universe containing just one bit of information.

This startling idea can be attributed in outline to Max Tegmark, Bruno Marchal and Jürgen Schmidhuber. To an information scientist – and all of physics can be regarded as a subset of information science – the information content of a system (its ‘Kolmogorov complexity’) is defined by the length of the computer program required to generate it. The program to generate an MWI system, an infinite multiverse, can be very short. Wei Dai has suggested a counting algorithm. For example, the BASIC program LET A=A+1; GOTO START will generate an enumerably infinite set of natural numbers. These can be mapped onto an infinite physical multiverse - but its information content is almost nil. On the other hand, the program required to generate a single classical universe might be as large as the universe itself.

By analogue, consider the Mandelbrot set, Ford froth, or a fractal pattern. The expression, znew=z² + c where z and c are complex numbers, can be used to generate infinitely complex, and beautiful ‘landscapes’ on the screen of a computer (see Figure 1). An inhabitant of a Mandelbrot world, would see amazingly rich complexity all around. Mathematicians, outside the Mandelbrot set, can understand that the Kolmogorov complexity of their world is very small - a short equation.

Given that we know that something exists (cogito ergo sum), it only takes one further assumption to give us MWI: that there exists the minimum possible amount of information compatible with something existing. Only one bit of information is required to distinguish between nothing and an infinite universe. Anyone who advocates a different interpretation of quantum physics has a lot of complexity to explain away.

Natural questions to ask at this point are: "so the universe is infinite, but why do I exist?", "Why is my universe the way it is?", "How can you explain death, taxes and the value of pi?". The answer is in the ‘weak anthropic principle’, which accounts for the fact that we see a stable, congenial environment around us. Most parts of the universe (or most universes if you prefer) are not suited to life, but we can only exist in universes hospitable to life, so only see those outcomes. The weak anthropic principle was proposed as an explanation for the laws, constants and regularities that we see in the cosmos us by Brandon Carter in 1974.

I would go further in arguing that ‘laws’ are merely those parameters which need to be within certain tolerances in order for us to survive. Professor Victor Stenger runs an internet page at the University of Hawaii which allows the user to choose certain initial parameters for a universe, and have his computer calculate the resulting constants such as the speed of light and atomic mass. Very few are hospitable to life, but those few are the ones life inhabits. The very Laws of Physics are subjective.

Most people have come to terms with the idea of an infinite universe. An infinite ‘multiverse’ is no bigger. But the idea that everything exists is frightening. It means, for one thing, that there is no particular significance attached to you or me. All variations of you exist, all variations of me; from almost all perspectives ‘we’ are pure noise in the infinite plenitude. We have significance, existence, purely from a subjective point of view. At this point, it may become clearer why this article is in the Middle Way.

To summarise the paper so far: there are good grounds for believing that everything exists. Everything includes an infinite number of beings of all possible descriptions. It includes a Christian God and a devil. It includes an infinite number of monkeys. It includes a thousand-foot ghost of my grandmother. It includes every dream you have ever dreamed. Everything is true.

Knowing this, we can see that it is purely for anthropic reasons – happenstance – that we pay any attention to our selves, or the world that we chance to find around us. It is an infinitely tiny sliver of an infinite multiverse.

We see ourselves as a subject undergoing successive experiences in time in a classical universe simply because our view is so restricted. If we could see the whole multiverse, we would not be able to see anything: it is all noise unless you ‘squint’ and look down a certain fissure in the multiverse, choosing a time line and spatial co-ordinates.

What would someone who fully understood and believed this feel? They would see that their universe is purely subjective. Nothing is objective. Everything is relative to the observer: space, time, truth. From an Archimedian perspective (outside the ‘multiverse’), you can see what you like in the universe. It makes no sense to single out one person, one universe, one set of physical laws or constants. As the Buddha taught, individual things neither exist, nor do not exist. The three signs of being, the characteristics common to all life, are impermanence, suffering, and an absence of a soul.

"Buddha keeps away from these discriminations and looks upon the world as upon a passing cloud. To Buddha every definitive thing is an illusion. He knows that whatever the mind grasps and throws away is insubstantial; thus He transcends the pitfalls of images and discriminative thought" (The Teaching of the Buddha, p.104)

The same space-time that contains you contains something else, when viewed from most perspectives. "To a man a river seems like a river but to a hungry demon which sees fire in water, it may seem to be like fire. Therefore, to speak to a man about a river existing would have some sense, but to the demon it would have no meaning" (ibid, p.110)

You are not an objective feature of reality; your self does not exist as an independent entity within the multiverse. But every event occurs. Time is not an objective feature of reality: the time is always now and the thought you have now is an event within the multiverse, not related to a thinker. Buddhaghosa says: "Mere suffering exists, but no sufferer is found; The deeds are, but no doer is found" (in Visuddhimagga).

A full, deep understanding of physics is equivalent in some ways to the Buddhist concept of enlightenment. The idea of self is relinquished. The very fabric of reality is seen to be subjective. The absurdity of attachments becomes clear. Ignorance and being are ended; the events of warmth, loving kindness and compassion exist.

Perhaps Western science could be assimilated by Buddhism, and Buddhism could be absorbed by science. Such a process would give back to the West a basis for morality. The irony is that this has happened in a billion worlds, and it will never happen in a billion others. To wish it on ‘our universe’ is to miss the point entirely.

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Bohm, David and Hiley, BJ, 1993, The Undivided Universe, Routledge, London

Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai, 1966, The Teaching of the Buddha, Kosaido, Tokyo

Carter, Brandon, 1974: ‘Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology’ in Longair, M.S. (ed), Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data, pp 291-298, IAU.

Dai, Wei, comments from the ‘everything-list’ at http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/

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Kapra, Fritjof, 1975 The Tao of Physics, Wildwood House

Kolmogorov, A. N, 1965, Inf. Transmission Vol. 1, No. 3

Marchal, Bruno, Calculabilité, Physique et Cognition, 1998, PhD thesis for the University of Lille

Visuddhimagga, Pali Text Society, London

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Price, Huw, 1996: Time’s arrow and the Archimedes Point, Oxford University Press

Schmidhuber, Jürgen, 1998, A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe and Everything, In Freksa, C, Jantzen, M, and Valk, R, eds., ‘Foundations of Computer Science: Potential - Theory - Cognition’, Lecture Notes in ‘Computer Science’, pages 201-208, Springer, 1997. (Submitted 1996). Also available at http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen

Stapp, Henry, Values and the Quantum Conception of Man, 1995, contribution to UNESCO symposium on Science and Culture, Tokyo

Stenger, Victor, The Timeless Quantum, work in progress

Tegmark, Max, 1995, Does the universe in fact contain almost no information? , Foundations of Physics Letters, Vol 9, No. 1, 1996, pages 25-42