From your morning coffee to the road leading to your office and all other things and people you experience in your everyday life are all part of the classical world. This world is governed by the rules and laws of classical physics.
However, quantum mechanics sheds light on another realm of extremely tiny things, like atoms, electrons, and photons. It is called the quantum world, and here, the rules are very different and often counterintuitive.
For instance, in the classical world, water can either be ice or liquid water at a given time—it cannot be both. But in the quantum world, a particle can exist in multiple states at once due to a phenomenon called superposition.
There are numerous other things that make the two worlds strikingly different from each other. However, surprisingly, simulations from a new study show that the classical world emerges from a wide range of quantum systems. This emergence is natural and inevitable and doesn’t need special conditions.
Connecting the two words through the many worlds theory
The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics states that every time a quantum measurement is made, the universe splits into different branches, each creating a parallel world with its own distinct reality.
The study authors suggest that our classical world is one of those stable branches. Within these diverse realities, the familiar classical experience is not merely possible but an inevitable consequence of how quantum systems behave macroscopically.
These findings are supported by computer simulations of various quantum systems, in which the authors analyzed the evolution of these systems across 50,000 distinct energy levels. The simulations demonstrated the rise of large, stable branch patterns.
Even when the study authors changed the energy levels, coupling strength, and other initial conditions for the quantum systems, they still led to the formation of similar branch patterns. This suggests that the formation of a classical system from quantum events is a natural and unavoidable process.
“Even a few atoms or photons can behave classically. Furthermore, it is a ubiquitous and generic phenomenon that does not require any fine-tuning: the emergence of a classical world is inevitable,” Philipp Strasberg, one of the study authors and a physicist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, said.
Some things remain consistent
This is not the first study to connect the quantum and classical worlds through the many world interpretations.
Previous studies have attempted to link the two worlds while focusing on quantum decoherence, a phenomenon suggesting that quantum systems lose their weirdness (properties like entanglement or superposition) when observed on a large scale.
However, those studies relied on certain conditions and assumptions for their results. Whereas the current study suggests that classical systems are supposed to emerge from quantum events without any fine-tuning.
This is because although quantum events seem chaotic and lead to many outcomes, they can produce a set of features that remain consistent and stable.
“This suggests a solution to the preferred basis problem of the many-worlds interpretation within a minimal theoretical framework without relying on environmentally induced decoherence, quantum Darwinism, Markov approximations, low-entropy initial states, or ensemble averages,” the study authors note.
These findings are of great importance as they provide valuable insights into how our classical world actually arises from the quantum one.
The study is published in the journal Physical Review X.
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