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(Continued from prior post)
tapaticmadness wrote: ↑Wed Jan 29, 2020 6:51 am
So you open the gift and behold it is a silver face with big black numbers. An actual watch. The scientific question now is, What happened to all the other possible watches? Did they vanish from existence? Did potentia collapse into that one actual one when you looked. Or is it, as the Many-World interpretation has it, did they become actual watches in other worlds? Yes, I like the simple, elegance of the Many-Worlds interpretation.
I never miss an opportunity to express my disdain of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
So here is my latest (slightly paraphrased) rant on the subject...
...(
Note: I am going to substitute your name in place of the person that this was originally written for in the comment section of physicist Sabine Hossenfelder’s blog):
“Hi tapaticmadness,
Hugh Everett’s original paper may indeed be brilliant, but that’s not what I have a (pet-peeve) problem with.
No, what bothers me is the popularized “branching worlds” nonsense encapsulated in Bryce Dewitt’s interpretation of Everett’s work.
As you probably know, Bryce Dewitt is the theoretical physicist who coined the term "many-worlds" and was an early and avid champion of Everett's Theory.
In an article for the magazine, Physics Today, Dewitt stated the following:
physicist Bryce Dewitt wrote:
“...I still recall vividly the shock I experienced on first encountering this multiworld concept. The idea of 10 to the 100+ slightly imperfect copies of oneself all constantly splitting into further copies, which ultimately become unrecognizable, is not easy to reconcile with common sense...”
As one minor example of the scale of this branching process, realize that the Many Worlds Interpretation implies that trillions of copies of ourselves,...
(along with trillions of copies of the entire universe)
...literally spring into existence by reason of the infinitesimal quantum events that take place within the context of the light waves we encounter as just one of us gazes at our computer screen for a couple of seconds.
(Please forgive me for belaboring this, but just let that sink in.)
Again, that’s trillions of autonomous universes branching-off of our universe by just - ONE OF US - looking at our computer screen for a couple of seconds; never mind the almost infinite number of other quantum events taking place - each and every second - throughout the rest of the universe.
Now in light of the preceding, it doesn’t require a lot of mind power to envision that the *
MWI* clearly suggests that ultimate reality consists of an exponentially-expanding,
never-ending - EXPLOSION - of new bubbles of reality (new branching universes) that not only continuously and instantly “effervesce” from the bubble of our universe,...
(think of popping the cork of a shaken bottle of champagne)
...but also from the instantaneous foaming/bubbling (branching) that would - IMMEDIATELY OCCUR - as an infinite number of our doppelgangers gaze at their own computer screens within the confines of each subsequent and autonomous universe...
...
(trillions of which just came into existence in the time it took you to read this parenthetical sentence).
Now I don’t know about you, tapaticmadness, but to me, the idea that the intricate details and fantastically complex workings of our universe...
(not to mention, our unique individualizations of personal consciousness)
...could simply be duplicated in such a willy-nilly fashion on such an unfathomable scale, is the most outrageous bucket of codswallop I’ve ever heard of.”
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