Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

Physics World

A many-worlds thriller

Jennifer Ouellette

Published Jun 1, 2010• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

History is replete with tales of scientists behaving badly, particularly when one of them dares to challenge the theories of another.
DOI
10.1088/2058-7058/23/06/37

Related papers

Cat Tales Reveal Footnotes to History that Give One Pause

Jack H. Hetherington, Robert J. von Gutfeld, William R. Hitchens +2 more

Physics Today•Apr 1, 1997•1 citation

History and many-worlds quantum theory

Euan J. Squires

Foundations of Physics Letters•Jun 1, 1992•5 citations

Tales of the Quantum: Understanding Physics' Most Fundamental Theory

Art Hobson

Everybody has heard that we live in a world made of atoms. But far more fundamentally, we live in a universe made of quanta. Many things are not made of atoms: light, radio waves, electric current, magnetic fields, Earth's gravitational field, not to mention exotica such a neutron stars, black holes, dark energy, and dark matter. But everything, including atoms, is made of highly unified or "coherent" bundles of energy called "quanta" that (like everything else) obey certain rules. In the case of the quantum, these rules are called "quantum physics." This is a book about quanta and their unexpected, some would say peculiar, behavior--tales, if you will, of the quantum. The quantum has developed the reputation of being capricious, bewildering, even impossible to understand. The peculiar habits of quanta are certainly not what we would have expected to find at the foundation of physical reality, but these habits are not necessarily bewildering and not at all impossible or paradoxical. This book explains those habits--the quantum rules--in everyday language, without mathematics or unnecessary technicalities. While most popular books about quantum physics follow the topic's scientific history from 1900 to today, this book follows the phenomena: wave-particle duality, fundamental randomness, quantum states, superpositions (being in two places at once), entanglement, non-locality, Schrodinger's cat, and quantum jumps, and presents the history and the scientists only to the extent that they illuminate the phenomena.

•Nov 15, 2016•13 citations

The cold, dark secrets of the Universe in few-body physics

Research outreach•Apr 4, 2023•0 citations

Making Sense of Non-Sense in Physics: The Quantum Koan

Michel Bitbol

In scientific knowledge, meaning-ascription is usually identified with representation-making. But quantum physics challenges this view. It has consistently prevented scientists from providing a unified narrative about the world, thus making them fear falling into non-sense. Few of them have accepted restricting their attention to the apparently nonsen- sical surface of micro-phenomena, together with the efficient predictive formalism of quantum theory, rather than telling a tale about putative depths behind phenomena. One wonders, then, whether taking repre- sentations as a paradigm of sense-making, even in cases like quantum physics where this looks problematic, is connected to a bias of Western culture. An alternative cultural stance, that of Zen Buddhism, is found to accommodate more easily the kind of non-representational episte- ology that makes sense of quantum physics.

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks•Jan 1, 2014•3 citations

Stranger that fiction parallel universes beguile science

Annie Hautefeuille

•Jan 1, 2007•0 citations
Everybody has heard that we live in a world made of atoms. But far more fundamentally, we live in a universe made of quanta. Many things are not made of atoms: light, radio waves, electric current, magnetic fields, Earth's gravitational field, not to mention exotica such a neutron stars, black holes, dark energy, and dark matter. But everything, including atoms, is made of highly unified or "coherent" bundles of energy called "quanta" that (like everything else) obey certain rules. In the case of the quantum, these rules are called "quantum physics." This is a book about quanta and their unexpected, some would say peculiar, behavior--tales, if you will, of the quantum. The quantum has developed the reputation of being capricious, bewildering, even impossible to understand. The peculiar habits of quanta are certainly not what we would have expected to find at the foundation of physical reality, but these habits are not necessarily bewildering and not at all impossible or paradoxical. This book explains those habits--the quantum rules--in everyday language, without mathematics or unnecessary technicalities. While most popular books about quantum physics follow the topic's scientific history from 1900 to today, this book follows the phenomena: wave-particle duality, fundamental randomness, quantum states, superpositions (being in two places at once), entanglement, non-locality, Schrodinger's cat, and quantum jumps, and presents the history and the scientists only to the extent that they illuminate the phenomena.
In scientific knowledge, meaning-ascription is usually identified with representation-making. But quantum physics challenges this view. It has consistently prevented scientists from providing a unified narrative about the world, thus making them fear falling into non-sense. Few of them have accepted restricting their attention to the apparently nonsen- sical surface of micro-phenomena, together with the efficient predictive formalism of quantum theory, rather than telling a tale about putative depths behind phenomena. One wonders, then, whether taking repre- sentations as a paradigm of sense-making, even in cases like quantum physics where this looks problematic, is connected to a bias of Western culture. An alternative cultural stance, that of Zen Buddhism, is found to accommodate more easily the kind of non-representational episte- ology that makes sense of quantum physics.