The many-worlds theory was originally suggested by physicist Hugh Everett III. He was an embittered, self-absorbed type and Everett's daughter, Elizabeth (who suffered from manic depression), committed suicide in 1996 (saying in her suicide note that she wished her ashes to be thrown out with the garbage so that she might "end up in the correct parallel universe to meet up with Daddy").
Re her suicide and the All the Myriad Ways story I mentioned: is this a case of Art imitating Life or Life imitating Art? Here's a documentary which features Everett's son meeting physicist Max Tegmark (Everett's intellectual successor) to discuss the many-worlds theory. https://vimeo.com/58603054 https://vimeo.com/58603054 ---In [email protected], <s3raphita@...> wrote : Re my post from a while back: "Someone (I forget who) wrote a sci-fi book in which the multiworlds quantum theory has been finally proved true and there is a mass outbreak of suicides as people realize that elsewhere there are other "themselves" who made the right career choice, made the right choice of partner, etc, and they can't bear the thought they're stuck in this universe as failures.": I just now came upon the title. It's All the Myriad Ways by Larry Niven. From Wiki: In the eponymous story contained within, Niven attempted to craft a response to stories featuring the many-worlds interpretation as a key plot point, taking the social implications of infinite realities to a depressing conclusion. A police detective, pondering a rash of unexplained suicides and murder-suicides occurring since the discovery of travel to parallel universes, begins to realize that if all possible choices that might be made are actually made in parallel universes, people will see their freedom of choice as meaningless. The choice not to commit suicide, or not to commit a crime, seems meaningless if one knows that in some other universe, the choice went the other way. They therefore kill themselves or commit the crime, because they abandon the sense of choice. I'm reading a book at the moment called Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark (described on the cover as "one of the rock gods of cosmology") which argues that the many-worlds theory is our best explanation for our physical universe. As a bonus he includes an experiment that could prove the many-worlds theory true! It involves playing Russian roulette with a gun that would fire or not depending on a 50/50 quantum uncertainty. Here's an explanation of "Quantum Suicide" from a web page. It's neat! http://io9.com/5891740/quantum-suicide-how-to-prove-the-multiverse-exists-in-the-most-violent-way-possible http://io9.com/5891740/quantum-suicide-how-to-prove-the-multiverse-exists-in-the-most-violent-way-possible
