Book: Other Worlds: Space, Super space and the Quantum Universe

Author: Paul Davies

Publisher: Penguin Books

Year: 1980

Reviewed by: Abhijeet Mukherjee

Introduction: Student of 1^st Semester, MBA, Lovely Professional University, Punjab.

What is the boundary between fiction and non-fiction? What is Parallel Universe? What is the real meaning of our cosmic existence?  A vast array of such questions is answered by Paul Davies in this book. When physicists began exploring the inner workings of the atom, they uncovered a world so weird that it overturned our very concept of reality. When you journey into the quantum universe you enter a world ruled by chance. Things which are beyond the explanation of Science are said to be fiction but what separates the reality and fiction is merely a matter of human perception. This book will challenge your perception how you inspect and adapt to the universe around you. Realities, laws, theories, thesis which we embrace from the very first instance we interacted with the world, seem like a mere dissolution of human perception and we get an even wider exposure of the cosmos and how they manipulate the entire Universe or Universes (alternatively speaking). Most revolutionary of all is the way in which quantum physics interweaves mind and matter in a subtle and holistic manner. It is here that scientists make the most startling claim of all: there exists more than one Universe each guided by their own laws and nature the so-called “Multiverse or Parallel Universe”

To say as Davies does that this world, this universe, might be just one of an infinite number of possible projections of super-space, coexisting with sibling universes. Davies is a prominent British astronomer/mathematician whose writing, moreover, at par with the exquisite science exposition for the layman associated with the best of rules and laws. For the first half of the book, he explains the familiar ground of paradoxes cast by quantum theory and special and general relativity and all the realities carved out by 20th-century physics that contradict the Newtonian world. In explaining them, Davies moves from the familiar and commonsensical to the bizarre and unreal through a series of logical steps. Davies’ presentation of Dirac’s thinking and Anderson’s discovery of the positron unfolds with rare beauty and clarity. After a brief number of chapters, we see that on the basis of above theories Davies explains those concepts which he was plotting for a long time. ”The Antimatter”. The second half of the book comes to grips with more philosophical issues; whole chapters dwell on the nature of reality, on time, and super time. These chapters permit Davies to repeat some of the earlier expositions, now fleshed out with considerations of how the human thinker fits in. Will our descendants abandon traditional notions of free will and the unidirectional arrow of time or could it be that our minds are more reliable than our laboratory instruments?