Cheers for the info. I'm a big Larry Niven fan. His book Ringworld switched me on to hard sci-fi when I were a lad. His Tales of Known Space books contain some potentially awesome sci-fi movies, Hollywood has yet to wake up to him in the same way as PKD. Maybe they know best as far as mass market movies go but the wild concepts and pace of the stories is just great. So I shall look up All the Myriad Ways for sure.
Regarding quantum suicide.... I'm going to have to think about that. My initial response is "after you" but there may be a way that the ever present randomness of the quantum world actually thwarts a large-scale experiment - and a small one too but it's less likely - by virtue of the fact that no matter how unlikely it is, with enough time it will happen. Especially with quantum events. If I had the time I would get out my book of probability equations and try and work it out. Actually, if I had a calculator big enough I'd try and work it out! But I'm sure that you'd never be able with 100% certainty that what you have is the result that answers the question. But I'll have to think about it some more.. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote : Re my post from a while back: "Someone (I forget who) wrote a sci-fi book in which the multiworlds quantum theory has been finally proved true and there is a mass outbreak of suicides as people realize that elsewhere there are other "themselves" who made the right career choice, made the right choice of partner, etc, and they can't bear the thought they're stuck in this universe as failures.": I just now came upon the title. It's All the Myriad Ways by Larry Niven. From Wiki: In the eponymous story contained within, Niven attempted to craft a response to stories featuring the many-worlds interpretation as a key plot point, taking the social implications of infinite realities to a depressing conclusion. A police detective, pondering a rash of unexplained suicides and murder-suicides occurring since the discovery of travel to parallel universes, begins to realize that if all possible choices that might be made are actually made in parallel universes, people will see their freedom of choice as meaningless. The choice not to commit suicide, or not to commit a crime, seems meaningless if one knows that in some other universe, the choice went the other way. They therefore kill themselves or commit the crime, because they abandon the sense of choice. I'm reading a book at the moment called Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark (described on the cover as "one of the rock gods of cosmology") which argues that the many-worlds theory is our best explanation for our physical universe. As a bonus he includes an experiment that could prove the many-worlds theory true! It involves playing Russian roulette with a gun that would fire or not depending on a 50/50 quantum uncertainty. Here's an explanation of "Quantum Suicide" from a web page. It's neat! http://io9.com/5891740/quantum-suicide-how-to-prove-the-multiverse-exists-in-the-most-violent-way-possible http://io9.com/5891740/quantum-suicide-how-to-prove-the-multiverse-exists-in-the-most-violent-way-possible
