

These implications are precisely those of what is called fundamental theology, the study of how God can be known about at all.* This implies not just that there is a pre-existing order to be discovered but also that such order in some sense wants itself to be discovered. For him, the essential presumption of science is the intelligibility of the universe. In fact Carroll defines science in general, not just physics, in theological terms. This is the traditional position of theologians who would like us all to consider God as the ultimate reality even if we find this reality to be not what we perceive it to be.


Carroll confirms this in his insistence that quantum physics is, in his words, not an ‘epistemic’ but an ‘ontological’ discipline His claim is that current quantum theory is a description of the way the world really is not merely a way of understanding the world. There is more than a hint of theological method in modern physics.

We are on the threshold of a new understanding-of where we are in the cosmos, and what we are made of. Rarely does a book so fully reorganize how we think about our place in the universe. Step-by-step in Carroll's uniquely lucid way, he tackles the major objections to this otherworldly revelation until his case is inescapably established. The Many Worlds Theory of quantum behavior says that every time there is a quantum event, a world splits off with everything in it the same, except in that other world the quantum event didn't happen. Many of every one of us.Ĭopies of you are generated thousands of times per second. We just have to accept that there is more than one of us in the universe. Putting his professional reputation on the line with this audacious yet entirely reasonable book, Carroll says that the crisis can now come to an end. Academics discourage students from working on the "dead end" of quantum foundations. Science popularizers keep telling us how weird it is, how impossible it is to understand. Quantum mechanics has always had obvious gaps-which have come to be simply ignored. Most physicists haven’t even recognized the uncomfortable truth: physics has been in crisis since 1927. His reconciling of quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of relativity changes, well, everything. Already hailed as a masterpiece, Something Deeply Hidden shows for the first time that facing up to the essential puzzle of quantum mechanics utterly transforms how we think about space and time. Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist and one of this world’s most celebrated writers on science, rewrites the history of 20th century physics. As you read these words, copies of you are being created.
