String theory is one of our most, if not the most promising avenue to be able to unify quantum mechanics and gravity.
However, one can just as well choose to accept that all these possibilities are true, and that they exist in different universes of a multiverse. In the case of the Schrödinger's cat, the cat is the superposition of "dead" and "alive" states.īut how do we interpret this to make any practical sense at all? One popular way is to think of all these possibilities as book-keeping devices so that the only "objectively true" cat state is the one we observe. Mathematically, a quantum mechanical state is a sum (or superposition) of all possible states. The reason that this can happen is that the space of possibilities in quantum mechanics is huge. The reason this seems so impossible is simply because our human intuition is not familiar with it.īut it is entirely possible according to the strange rules of quantum mechanics.
The act of opening the box allows us to follow one of the possible future histories of our cat, including one in which it is both dead and alive. You may have heard the thought experiment of Schrödinger's cat, a spooky animal who lives in a closed box. Instead the idea that the universe is perhaps one of infinitely many is derived from current theories like quantum mechanics and string theory. We have not waved our hands and said: "Let there be a multiverse". It is important to keep in mind that the multiverse view is not actually a theory, it is rather a consequence of our current understanding of theoretical physics.
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