The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that asserts that the universal wave function is objectively real, and that there is no wave function collapse. This implies that all possible outcomes of quantum measurements are physically realized in different "worlds". The evolution of reality as a whole in MWI is rigidly deterministic and dynamically local. Many-worlds is also called the relative state formulation or the Everett interpretation, after physicist Hugh Everett, who first proposed it in 1957. Bryce DeWitt popularized the formulation and named it many-worlds in the 1970s. In modern versions of many-worlds, the subjective appearance of wave function collapse is explained by the mechanism of quantum decoherence. Decoherence approaches to interpreting quantum theory have been widely explored and developed since the 1970s. MWI is considered a mainstream interpretation of quantum mechanics, along with the other decoherence interpretations, the Copenhagen interpretation, and hidden variable theories such as Bohmian mechanics. In the many-worlds interpretation, the universal wave function evolves unitarily without collapse. Interactions lead to decoherence, producing dynamically independent components of the wave function that correspond to different macroscopic outcomes. These components are sometimes called "worlds", though they are emergent, approximate, and not fundamental entities. This is intended to resolve the measurement problem and thus some paradoxes of quantum theory, such as Wigner's friend, the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) paradox and Schrödinger's cat, since the universal wave function contains components corresponding to every possible outcome of a quantum event.
Overview of the interpretation The many-worlds interpretation's key idea is that the linear and unitary dynamics of quantum mechanics applies everywhere and at all times and so describes the whole universe. In particular, it models a measurement as a unitary transformation, a correlation-inducing interaction, between observer and object, without using a collapse postulate, and models observers as ordinary quantum-mechanical systems. This stands in contrast to the Copenhagen interpretation, in which a measurement is a "primitive" concept, not describable by unitary quantum mechanics; using the Copenhagen interpretation the universe is divided into a quantum and a classical domain, and the collapse postulate is central. In MWI, there is no division between classical and quantum: everything is quantum and there is no collapse. MWI's main conclusion is that the universe (or multiverse in this context) is composed of a quantum superposition of an uncountable or undefinable amount or number of increasingly divergent, non-communicating parallel universes or quantum worlds. Sometimes dubbed Everett worlds, each is an internally consistent and actualized alternative history or timeline. The many-worlds interpretation uses decoherence to explain the measurement process and the emergence of a quasi-classical world. Wojciech H. Zurek, one of decoherence theory's pioneers, said: "Under scrutiny of the environment, only pointer states remain unchanged. Other states decohere into mixtures of stable pointer states that can persist, and, in this sense, exist: They are einselected". Zurek emphasizes that his work does not depend on a particular interpretation. The many-worlds interpretation shares many similarities with the decoherent histories interpretation, which also uses decoherence to explain the process of measurement or wave function collapse. MWI treats the other histories or worlds as real, since it regards the universal wave function as the "basic physical entity" or "the fundamental entity, obeying at all times a deterministic wave equation". The decoherent histories interpretation, on the other hand, needs only one of the histories (or worlds) to be real. Several authors, including Everett, John Archibald Wheeler and David Deutsch, call many-worlds a theory or metatheory, rather than just an interpretation. Everett argued that it was the "only completely coherent approach to explaining both the contents of quantum mechanics and the appearance of the world". Deutsch dismissed the idea that many-worlds is an "interpretation", saying that to call it an interpretation "is like talking about dinosaurs as an 'interpretation' of fossil records".
Formulation In his 1957 doctoral dissertation, Everett proposed that, rather than relying on external observation for analysis of isolated quantum systems, one could mathematically model an object, as well as its observers, as purely physical systems within the mathematical framework developed by Paul Dirac, John von Neumann, and others, discarding altogether the ad hoc mechanism of wave function collapse.
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