Editor's Summary
5 July 2007
Many Worlds
Yes, this is Nature. The cover art, by David Parkins, salutes a big year for quantum physics: 50 years ago, Hugh Everett III proposed what came to be known as the 'many worlds' hypothesis. He took quantum physics at face value, and imagined what it really meant. He aimed to resolve the paradoxes of quantum theory by allowing every possible outcome to every event to exist in its own world. In a News Feature, Mark Buchanan reports on modern reactions to the 'many worlds' idea. Although too bizarre for most physicists of the 1950s, many worlds theory now has its followers, including Max Tegmark, who laments in a Commentary that Everett's original paper is not as widely read as it should be. Tegmark also explains why he believes in parallel universes which, as Gary Wolfe illustrates in Books & Arts, are of course meat and drink to science fiction writers. Life sciences also have their place in this fiction-inspired issue and the whole is brought together in an Editorial.
Editorial: Parallel worlds galore
The 50th anniversary of an astonishing scientific hypothesis deserves celebration. So too do the truly astounding tales of a literary genre that anticipated it.
doi:10.1038/448001a
News Feature: Many worlds: See me here, see me there
Fifty years ago, a physics student dissatisfied with the standard view of quantum mechanics came up with a radical new interpretation. Mark Buchanan reports on the ensuing debate.
doi:10.1038/448015a
News Feature: The biologists strike back
Time machines, spaceships, atomic blasters — the icons of science fiction tend to come from the physical sciences. But science fiction has a biological side too, finding drama and pathos in everything from alien evolution to the paradoxes of consciousness. Nature brought together four science-fiction writers with a background in the biological sciences to talk about life-science fiction.
doi:10.1038/448018a
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Commentary: Many lives in many worlds
Accepting quantum physics to be universally true, argues Max Tegmark, means that you should also believe in parallel universes.
doi:10.1038/448023a
Books and Arts: Surfing the multiverse
The 'many worlds' of quantum mechanics spawned many more of science fiction.
doi:10.1038/448025a
