The Copenhagen Interpretation—that sounds like the title of a cool sci-fi film!
It’s a sci-fi theory, too! The Copenhagen Interpretation says that watching the electron causes the wave of probabilities to collapse into a definite position. But until you take a look, all the different possibilities exist at the same time.
That’s even crazier! How can an electron know that someone’s watching it?
That’s what Schrödinger thought. Writing to his friend Albert Einstein, Schrödinger came up with his “cat in the box” thought experiment to prove how crazy the Copenhagen Interpretation was. As Albie’s dad explains in his book:
A cat is put inside a box with a lump of radioactive uranium that has a 50 percent chance of decaying. This means that at any moment, there is a 50 percent chance of a radioactive particle being emitted. If the Geiger counter detects a radioactive particle, it will trigger the hammer and smash open the bottle of poison. This will kill the cat. However, quantum physics says that until the box is opened and we take a look, the particle will be in both possible states—decayed and undecayed—simultaneously. This means the cat inside the box is dead and alive at the same time!
In the real world, there’s no way something can be dead AND alive at the same time. However, scientists working in a laboratory HAVE managed to film atoms existing in two different states at the same time—just like Schrödinger’s cat!
Okay, so bananas are radioactive, and an atom can be in two different places at once, but parallel universes don’t exist—do they?
We just don’t know. According to Hugh Everett’s Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, our universe is constantly splitting into new parallel universes. In his theory, taking a look at the electron being fired in the double-slit experiment doesn’t just cause the wave of 167 probable places the electron could be to collapse into one, it causes the universe to split into different universes for every probable position the electron could be in! In one universe, a scientist will see the electron go through the left-hand slit, and in another universe, a different version of the same scientist will see the electron go through the right-hand slit! As Albie’s dad explains, “Everything that can happen does happen somewhere.”
So can I jump into a cardboard box like Albie to travel to these parallel worlds and meet a different version of me?
Not so fast! Albie’s cardboard box came with a quantum computer that was hooked up to the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, near Geneva, Switzerland. So far in the real world, scientists have only been able to build simple quantum computers to solve single problems, so you won’t be able to use one to help you to hop to a parallel world—yet! However, the atom-smashing experiments that scientists are performing at the Large Hadron Collider might be able to detect mini black holes that could provide evidence for the existence of different dimensions where these parallel universes hide. So maybe one day we’ll be able to find many worlds filled with copies of you and me, just like Albie did….
Christopher Edge grew up in Manchester, England, where he spent most of his childhood in the local library dreaming up stories, but now lives in Gloucestershire, where he spends most of his time in the local library dreaming up stories. Before becoming a writer, he worked as an English teacher, an editor, and a publisher—any job that let him keep a book close at hand. When not writing, he also works as a freelance publisher and education consultant, encouraging children to read. Visit Christopher at christopheredge.co.uk and follow him online.
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The Many Worlds of Albie Bright Page 12