PARALLEL UNIVERSES: The Search for Other Worlds

Wolf has demonstrated a facility for expounding on matters physical and cosmological in earlier volumes. However, the current work, even more emphatically than Star Wave (1985), has the physicist propounding theses that go beyond the merely improbable to the surreal. From early on, Wolf is so convinced of the reality of parallel universes--""worlds that exist side by side along with our own""--that the concept becomes the desideratum for myriad phenomena--from black holes to schizophrenia. Wolf's jumping-off place is the ""new physics,"" which, for him, requires a new unified picture of the world. His unity, however, involves the paradoxes and conundrums associated with Uncertainity, Duality, and the influence of the observer on the observed. (All those one-slit, two-slit particle-wave experiments that suggest that the way you set up the experiment determines what you get: shades of John Wheeler, David Bohm, et al.; shades of Schrodinger's cat, the present determining the past, the future the present, and so on.) Wolf says that parallel universes were conceived in 1957 by Hugh Everett III, a physicist at Princeton. You conceive of as many universes as necessary to represent ""the wave of all possibilies"" for a real subatomic particle. . .or a real you or me. Given the existence of infinite worlds, we have infinite possibilities for time travel, for scurrying through wormhole black holes to a brighter future elsewhere. We can explain multiple personalities. And ESP. And we can become ""Tachynauts""--travellers at speeds faster than light. Even Wolf admits it's weird. But he thinks weird is wonderful.