Something Deeply Hidden Review: Many Worlds and What the Equations Mean
I picked up Sean Carroll’s Something Deeply Hidden partly out of curiosity and partly out of lingering confusion. Quantum mechanics has always been one of those subjects where the explanations feel simultaneously elegant and deeply unsatisfying. The mathematics works with extraordinary precision, but ask what is actually happening underneath the equations and the answers become vague remarkably quickly. Carroll’s book tackles exactly that gap. It is not primarily about how to calculate quantum outcomes. It is about what kind of reality the successful calculations might describe. His central wager is both simple and extravagant: perhaps quantum mechanics becomes intelligible when we stop adding special rules to it. Let the quantum state evolve according to the usual equations at all times, without a mysterious collapse during measurement, and the result is the Everett or Many-Worlds interpretation. The mathematics becomes more austere. Reality becomes considerably more crowded. ...