On 12/27/2013 9:18 AM, Edgar L. Owen wrote:
Jason,
Neither of the first 2 points you make here seem correct to me but you don't express
them clearly enough for me to know why you are saying what you are saying.
As to the first point, the present moment is self-evident direct experience whereas wave
function collapse is an outlandish interpretation of quantum equations which has no
basis at all in direct experience, or in quantum theory = the actual equations. Anyway
the theory of decoherence put wave function collapse to rest long ago but the
self-evident experience of the present moment cannot be falsified by any theory.
Please explain why "Given Bell's result, If you reject many-worlds, you must also reject
special relativity's edict that nothing can travel faster than light, (or as you and I
say, that everything travels at the speed of light)"
I'm not familiar with this result and something is clearly wrong with it.
Many worlds is probably the most outlandishly improbable theory of all time, and should
have been laughed out of existence as soon as it was proposed.
And it was for a long time. But recent polls of physicist have found it be favored by a
large fraction if not a plurality.
Do you actually understand what it says or implies? Basically that every quantum event
that ever occured in the history of the universe spawns an entire new universe of all
its possible outcomes and every event in every one of those new universes does the same.
That's an overly literal interpretation of the popularized version. All those
"unobserved", i.e. still coherent, events exist in superpositions. Only decoherence
resolves them (almost) to classically distinct "worlds". And as Scott Aaronson points out
they can't really be entirely distinct since they have to interfere with each other
destructively to eliminate the cross-terms.
This immediately exponentially escalates in the first few minutes of the universe into
uncountable new universes and has been expanding exponentially ever since over 14.7
billion years! Just try to calculate the number of new universe that now exist. It's
larger than the largest number that could ever be imagined or even written down. There
is not enough paper in the universe, or enough computer memory in the entire universe to
even express a number this large!
Of course Bruno, or any mathematician, will point out that all those numbers you mention
are finite. And in any case both QM and GR assume continuum backgrounds that imply
uncountable possible states.
Doesn't anyone ever use common sense and think through these things to see how stupid
they are?
But common sense gave us the flat Earth told us Darwin was wrong.
And it violates all sorts of conservations since energy eg. is multiplied exponentially
beyond counting.
But it's also divided up according to the probability measure, so I don't think
conservation laws are violated in Everett's formulation.
Geeez, it would be impossible to come up with something dumber, especially when it is
completely clear that decoherence theory falsifies it conclusively.
Decoherence can only diagonalize the partial density matrix (and even that only
approximately) by tracing over the environmental variables. From an epistemic
persepective that may be enough; as Omnes says, "Quantum mechanics is a probabilistic
theory, so one should not be surprised that it predicts probabilities.". But that does
not make the Everett interpretation wrong.
Brent
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
