On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 06:30:07PM -0700, Pierz wrote: > Recently I've been studying a lot of history, and I've often thought about > how, according to special relativity, you can translate time into space and > vice versa, and therefore how from a different perspective we can think of > the past as distant in space rather than time: my childhood being 40 light > years away, rather than 40 years for instance. I can visualise my own body > as a sort of long, four dimensional tendril through spacetime, of which I > only ever see a three-dimensional cross-section. This is the block universe > idea of course. What occurred to me recently was that the past, in any > physical theory I know of, is "locked down". There is only a single history > consistent with the present (ignoring the microscopic ambiguities of > quantum interference effects), but the present is consistent with multiple > futures.
This assumption is wrong. There are many histories (pasts) consistent with our present. If we don't know some fact about the past (eg T. Rex's colour), then pasts with different colours of T.Rexes are all compatible with our present. Only when we make a measurement that distinguishes between different facts about the past, do we eliminate some of those pasts from the compatibility list. There are, however, arrows of time - past and future are asymmetric, the future is more uncertain than the past. But I don't see how you can leverage that into support for the MWI. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Senior Research Fellow hpco...@hpcoders.com.au Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
