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- TL;DR Summary
- Did Wheeler accept Carter's anthropic principle-based multiverse?
Physicist John Wheeler wrote an article called "Genesis and Observership" where he said near the end:
"We have reviewed the evidence out of the big bang tat the universe did come into being and the evidence that not only space but all the structures and laws of physics are mutable. In the domain in which each law is applicable that law states itself most compactly as the consequence of a symmetry; but that symmetry hides any view of the next layer of structure. Not the slightest hint presents itself of any 'ultimate' layer of structure either of mathematics or physics. One is led to ask whether the interconnections between one level of structure and the next, rather than continuing forever, do not close up full circle on the observer himself. Nothing speaks more strongly for this thesis than the anthropic principle of Carter and Dicke and the indispensable place of the participating observer-as evidenced in quantum mechanics-in defining any useful concept of reality. No way is evident to bring these considerations together into a larger unity except through the thesis of 'genesis of observership'"
Does this mean that Wheeler considered that there was a ensemble of universes, all existing simultaneously, as Carter postulated?
If yes, how can this be compatible with the fact that Wheeler did not like the idea of having multiple universes existing at once, which he expressed in various times?
"Hugh Everett, then a Princeton graduate student working under the eminent physicist John Archibald Wheeler, first set out the many-universes implications of quantum theory. Wheeler did not accept them. He was (and still is) convinced that Bohr’s vision, though incomplete, was the basis of the correct explanation"
(From David Deutsch's "The fabric of Reality")
So what did Wheeler think? Did he reject the Many Worlds Interpretation but accepted Carter's Anthropic Multiverse?
"We have reviewed the evidence out of the big bang tat the universe did come into being and the evidence that not only space but all the structures and laws of physics are mutable. In the domain in which each law is applicable that law states itself most compactly as the consequence of a symmetry; but that symmetry hides any view of the next layer of structure. Not the slightest hint presents itself of any 'ultimate' layer of structure either of mathematics or physics. One is led to ask whether the interconnections between one level of structure and the next, rather than continuing forever, do not close up full circle on the observer himself. Nothing speaks more strongly for this thesis than the anthropic principle of Carter and Dicke and the indispensable place of the participating observer-as evidenced in quantum mechanics-in defining any useful concept of reality. No way is evident to bring these considerations together into a larger unity except through the thesis of 'genesis of observership'"
Does this mean that Wheeler considered that there was a ensemble of universes, all existing simultaneously, as Carter postulated?
If yes, how can this be compatible with the fact that Wheeler did not like the idea of having multiple universes existing at once, which he expressed in various times?
"Hugh Everett, then a Princeton graduate student working under the eminent physicist John Archibald Wheeler, first set out the many-universes implications of quantum theory. Wheeler did not accept them. He was (and still is) convinced that Bohr’s vision, though incomplete, was the basis of the correct explanation"
(From David Deutsch's "The fabric of Reality")
So what did Wheeler think? Did he reject the Many Worlds Interpretation but accepted Carter's Anthropic Multiverse?