Why Parallel Universes Are Probably Real
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as an accessible explanation of many-worlds versus single-world wave collapse.
What it is
Veritasium explains the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, drawing heavily on Sean Carroll's book. It walks through the Schrodinger equation and why wave collapse may be unnecessary if the universe keeps splitting.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2020 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends menzoic · 2020-08 · on “Physicists found a new quantum paradox that casts doubt on a pillar of reality”
Veritasium has a great video that explains the concept of parallel worlds vs wave collapse in a single world [this video]
Cites tarruda · 2020-10 · on “Gravity is not a force – free-fall parabolas are straight lines in spacetime”
As the parent comment says, everything in physics depends on how you observe ("... best described"). Like Sean Carroll said in the Veritassium video about the "many worlds" [1], there's no such such thing as "pressure", it is just the interaction of fluid molecules. For practical purposes though, it is best described as a scalar called "pressure". [1] [this video]
Cites conartist6 · 2025-07 · on “Proposed NOAA Budget Kills Program Designed to Prevent Satellite Collisions”
People want and need to learn about science from sources they trust because actually parsing through a scientific paper critically (as a peer reviewer would do) is very hard and is likely only to leave you with more questions while providing an incredibly narrow kind of knowledge. What interests me is the politics of it. A paper in a vacuum is nothing. How do people really convince each other of the importance of one argument or observation over another? How do those arguments grow to the scale of a whole society? Science at the scale of society doesn't happen in the language of scientific papers, but rather in rhetoric: in appeals to what the Greeks categorized as Ethos (Emotion), Pathos (A