Not that I’m claiming I could have done better, if I’d been born into that time, instead of this one…

Macroscopic decoherence, a.k.a. many-worlds, was first proposed in a 1957 paper by Hugh Everett III. The paper was ignored. John Wheeler told Everett to see Niels Bohr. Bohr didn’t take him seriously.

Crushed, Everett left academic physics, invented the general use of Lagrange multipliers in optimization problems, and became a multimillionaire.

It wasn’t until 1970, when Bryce DeWitt (who coined the term “many-worlds”) wrote an article for Physics Today, that the general field was first informed of Everett’s ideas. Macroscopic decoherence has been gaining advocates ever since, and may now be the majority viewpoint (or not).

But suppose that decoherence and macroscopic decoherence had been realized immediately following the discovery of entanglement, in the 1920s. And suppose that no one had proposed collapse theories until 1957. Would decoherence now be steadily declining in popularity, while collapse theories were slowly gaining steam?

Imagine an alternate Earth, where the very first physicist to discover entanglement and superposition said, “Holy flaming monkeys, there’s a zillion other Earths out there!”

In the years since, many hypotheses have been proposed to explain the mysterious Born probabilities. But no one has yet suggested a collapse postulate. That possibility simply has not occurred to anyone.

One day, Huve Erett walks into the office of Biels Nohr…

“I just don’t understand,” Huve Erett said, “why no one in physics even seems interested in my hypothesis. Aren’t the Born statistics the greatest puzzle in modern quantum theory?”

Biels Nohr sighed. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t even bother, but something about the young man compelled him to try.

“Huve,” says Nohr, “every physicist meets dozens of people per year who think they’ve explained the Born statistics. If you go to a party and tell someone you’re a physicist, chances are at least one in ten they’ve got a new explanation for the Born statistics. It’s one of the most famous problems in modern science, and worse, it’s a problem that everyone thinks they can understand. To get attention, a new Born hypothesis has to be… pretty darn good.”

“And this,” Huve says, “this isn’t good?”

Huve gestures to the paper he’d brought to Biels Nohr. It is a short paper. The title reads, “The Solution to the Born Problem.” The ...

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