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table of contents
Half Title Page
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Annotated Contents
Preface
1 Introduction
1. The Plan: Three Multiverse Proposals
2. What Do I Believe?
3. What Should You Believe?
4. What Would You Risk? Confidence vs. Caution
5. Beware the Beguiling Power of Words
6. Can We Be Sure That We Are in the Same Universe?
7. Notes and Further Reading
2 Physics and Philosophy from 1600 to 1900
1. The Tradition of Natural Philosophy
2. The Mechanical Philosophy
3. Newton’s Theory of Gravity: Unbelievable?
4. Optimism about Understanding Nature: “We Will Soon Deduce the Effect from the Cause”
5. Lowering Our Sights: Hume
6. Newton Again
7. Logic in the Doldrums—and Its Revival
8. Houses Built on Sand—and How to Repair Them
9. Notes and Further Reading
3 All the Logically Possible Worlds
1. The Legacy of Logicism: The Endeavour of Reduction
2. Logic as a Toolbox of Formal Systems: Modal Logics
3. Up to Our Necks in Modality
4. A Philosopher’s Paradise
5. Paradise, Part I: Intensional Semantics
6. Paradise, Part II: Modality and Laws of Nature
7. Paradise, Part III: Counterfactual Conditionals
8. Paradise, Part IV: Supervenience: Materialism, Physicalism, and Determinism
9. Existential Angst: What Are Possible Worlds?
10. Lewis’ Modal Realism
11. Notes and Further Reading
4 All the Worlds Encoded in the Quantum State of the Cosmos
1. What Is Matter? From Lumps in the Void to Fields
2. The Quantum State: Probabilities for Classical Alternatives
3. Amplitudes and Quantum Fields
4. The Measurement Problem: Schrödinger’s Cat
5. Solving the Problem: The Usual Suspects
6. Everett’s Proposal: A Bluff?
7. Doing Better with Decoherence
8. A Sketch Definition of “World”
9. On What There Is: Objects as Patterns
10. A Reversal of Ideas
11. Probabilistic Angst: What Is Objective Probability?
12. Subjective Probability to the Rescue?
13. Notes and Further Reading
5 All the Worlds from the Primordial Bubbles
1. Comparing the Everettian and Cosmological Multiverses
2. A Golden Age of Cosmology
3. Inflation . . . Eternally
4. Glimpsing the Landscape of String Theory
5. Angst About Explanation
6. Expected Because Generic
7. Difficulties About Being Generic
8. Biased Sampling: Eddington’s Net
9. Selection Effects in Cosmology: The Anthropic Principle and the Cosmological Constant
10. Confirming a Theory of the Multiverse
11. Notes and Further Reading
6 Multiverses Compared—and Combined?
1. What I Believe
2. Why Don’t We See the Other Universes?
3. One Reality to Rule Them All?
4. Envoi
5. Notes and Further Reading
Note about the Bibliography
Bibliography
Index
About This Text
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