'Thought this article might be of interest to the recent discussion,
right down to the mention of Borges Garden of Forking Paths:
FYI:
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/digicult/dc2000-05-03.htm
Reimagining the Cosmos
Through the quest for a quantum computer -- described in Julian Brown's
new book, Minds, Machines, and the Multiverse -- much is becoming clear
about the strange, paradoxical world governed by quantum mechanics. Will
it change the way we think about our universe (or multiverse)?
by Harvey Blume
........EXCERPTED (HF):
This is where David Deutsch's "many-world," or multiverse,
interpretation comes in. Deutsch believes that when quantum phenomena
appear to be absurd, they are absurd. It's not the human mind that's at
fault, only our current model of the cosmos. No, a photon can't go
through two holes simultaneously, which it appears to do in the two hole
experiment -- at least not in a single universe. Eliminating the
impossible, like Sherlock Holmes, Deutsch comes to the only remaining
conclusion (if, indeed, it's any less impossible): he reasons that there
must be more than one universe involved. When the photon appears to be
in two places at the same time, we're really encountering an
infinitesimal overlap of worlds, in each of which the photon behaves
normally enough, passing through only one hole at a time. Writers who
explore the notion of parallel universes -- like Jorge Luis Borges in
his story "The Garden of Forking Paths" -- would find only reinforcement
in Deutsch's view of quantum mechanics. In the multiverse, what we
perceive as quantum weirdness is the residue of the never-ending bump
and grind of worlds that may differ at one instant by nothing more than
the direction of a photon, which will be enough to send them hurtling
down incalculably different evolutionary paths.
