On Tue, Feb 4, 2025 at 6:22 PM Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
*If all possibilities were realized the wouldn't have probabilities > assigned to them...exactly the problem that arises in MWI.* *You've forgotten that it's not just an electron that is a quantum object** and thus part of the Universal Wave Function (UWF), you are also part of the UWF. There are an astronomical number of branches of the UWF, perhaps an infinite number, and those branches do not interact with each other and thus can be interpreted as separate "worlds". You the observer are stuck in just one of those branches and thus lack sufficient information to know if you are in the branch where the cat is alive or the branch where the cat is dead, you need to open the box and look in to get that information, before that you do what you always do when you don't have enough information to be certain, you work with probabilities. * *The quantum bomb tester demonstrates it is possible to obtain information about an object without interacting with it in any way, the bomb does explode in some branches (a.k.a. worlds) of the UWF but if you set things up properly you the observer will be in a branch where the bomb did NOT explode and yet you know for certain the bomb is working properly and will explode if it detects even one photon. Many Worlds can easily explain how interaction free measurement could work, and do so without invoking some sort of ill defined wave function collapse, by simply acknowledging that all outcomes occur each in its own independent branch of the UWF. But the competitors of Many Worlds struggle to give an intuitive explanation of how interaction free measurement could possibly work. And this is important! * *Years ago in high school physics I was taught a derivation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle that started from the assumption that you'd have to use photons to detect something and that would always disturb what you're looking at, but I now know that derivation was invalid; it got the right answer but for the wrong reason. The real reason is due to the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle is derived from the non-commuting nature of observable operators, like position and momentum, or energy and time.* *I've also heard the “using photons to detect something disturbs it” argument to explain why Maxwell's Demon does not violate the Second Law Of Thermodynamics, but that argument is also invalid, the true answer is that unless the demon's brain had infinite memory storage at some point it would have to erase information, and that would require energy and increase entropy.* *John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>* 3nk -- 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 [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv1KvZ6Ww%3Db0vUq79Q9-dGzBhnkHF0de5Utc%3D9JGV9HpLQ%40mail.gmail.com.
