clifford_a-_pickover_surfing_through_hyperspacebookfi-org

SATAN AND PERPENDICULAR WORLDS 73
those where all inhabitants believe in God, and everything in between. According
to the many-worlds theory, there could be universes where Jesus was the son
of God, universes where Jesus was the son of the devil, and universes where
Jesus did not exist. (See Addendum.)
Much of Everett's many-worlds interpretation is concerned with events on
the submicroscopic level. For example, the theory predicts that every time an
electron either moves or fails to move to a new energy level, a new universe is
created. Currently, it is not clear the degree to which quantum (submicroscopic)
theories impact on reality at the macroscopic, human level. Quantum
theory even clashes with relativity theory, which forbids faster-than-light
(FTL) transfer of information. For example, quantum theory introduces an
element of uncertainty into our understanding of the universe and states that
any two particles that have once been in contact continue to influence each
other, no matter how far apart they move, until one of them interacts or is
observed. In a strange way, this suggests that the entire universe is multiply
connected by FTL signals. Physicists call this type of interaction "cosmic glue."
The holy grail of physics is the reconciling of quantum and relativistic physics.
What exactly is quantum theory? First, it is a modern science of the very
small. It accurately describes the behavior of elementary particles, atoms, molecules,
atom-sized black holes, and probably the birth of the universe when the
universe was smaller than a proton. For more than a half-century, physicists
have used quantum theory as a mathematical tool for describing the behavior
of matter (electrons, protons, neutrons . . . ) and various fields (gravity, weak
and strong nuclear forces, and electromagnetism). It's a practical theory used to
understand the behavior of devices ranging from lasers to computer chips.
Quantum theory describes the world as a collection of possibilities until a measurement
makes one of these possibilities real. Quantum particles seem to be
able to influence one another via quantum connections—superluminal links
persisting between any two particles once they have interacted. When these
ultrafast connections were first proposed, physicists dismissed them as mere
theoretical artifacts, existing only in mathematical formalisms, not in the real
world. Albert Einstein considered the idea to be so crazy that it had to demonstrate
there was something missing in quantum theory. In the late 1960s, however,
Irish physicist John Stewart Bell proved that a quantum connection was
more than an interesting mathematical theory. In particular, he showed that
real superluminal links between quantum particles explain certain experimental
results. Bell's theorem suggests that after two particles interact and move
apart outside the range of interaction, the particles continue to influence each