{"id":11670,"date":"2014-02-12T11:39:43","date_gmt":"2014-02-12T19:39:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/?p=11670"},"modified":"2014-02-11T23:19:18","modified_gmt":"2014-02-12T07:19:18","slug":"the-many-worlds-of-quantum-mechanics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2014\/02\/12\/the-many-worlds-of-quantum-mechanics\/","title":{"rendered":"The Many Worlds of Quantum Mechanics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greetings from Sihanoukville, Cambodia, or at least the waters immediately off. I’m here as part of Bright Horizons 19<\/a>, a two-week cruise on the Holland American ship Vollendam<\/em>, in collaboration with Scientific American<\/em>. We started in Hong Kong and have been working our way south, stopping a few times in Vietnam, and after this we’ll briefly visit Thailand before finishing in Singapore. A fascinating, once-in-a-lifetime experience, even if two weeks is an amount of time I can’t honestly afford to be taking off. Been getting a touch of work done here and there, but not as much as I would have liked, in between dashes ashore to sample the local cuisine. Although the local cuisine has been pretty spectacular, I have to admit.<\/p>\n

My job here is to give a few talks about physics and cosmology to the folks who signed up for the package — a public audience, but the kind of people whose idea of a good time while sailing the South China Sea is hearing talks about molecular biology or world history. Mostly my talks are variations of themes I’ve spoken on frequently before — the Higgs boson, the arrow of time, dark matter and dark energy. But to spice things up I decided to throw in something new, so I wrote up a talk on The Many Worlds of Quantum Mechanics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And here it is — the slides, at least. The content is roughly based on my explanation in From Eternity to Here<\/em><\/a>, with a few improvements thrown in. <\/p>\n