On Sun, May 28, 2017 at 4:24 AM, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Saturday, May 27, 2017, Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au> wrote: >> >> 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. >> >> > > > I agree, there are multiple pasts compatible with our future. Some if these > can't be ruled out with any possible measurements, like in the case if the > quantum erasure. > > That entropy increases does mean there are more futures than pasts.
This is an interesting point. It goes in the direction of something that I ponder on for a while (possibly a trivial thought for physicists): being that the moment of the big bang is the simplest possible state conceivable, and assuming the MWI, ISTM that the moment of the big bang is shared by all histories, being in fact a nexus between all possible worlds. A crazier idea is this: can you increase your freedom in relation to the past (in the sense of admitting more branches) by destroying memories? Regarding more futures than pasts: the idea makes sense, but I would say only at a statistical physics level. That is to say, what we call "progress" as human beings can be seen as an increase in complexity. People that think about complex systems tend to like this idea that life is a phenomenon that happens "at the edge of chaos", which is to say, there is some entropic "sweet spot" where it thrives. This suggests to me that, although the number of possible states increases with the arrow of time, at some point the complexity will go down. In other words: the far future is increasingly boring... > Regarding special relatively and collapse, I think the point is that two > observers in different reference frames can have different presents. Two > humans walking past each other on the sidewalk may have presents that > include the Andromeda Galaxy hours apart in time. (See "Andromeda Paradox"). > So if something on Earth collspses the wave everywhere and instantly (in the > present) which present is it collapsed in? > > I think this even more clearly shows the incompatibility between collapse > theories and special relatively, beyond just pointing to the FTL influences > as violations; this shows now we have to somehow use an objective reference > frame which relatively tells us does not exist. And this leads to collapse > events happening in different times/places for different observers, even > ones walking past each other on a sidewalk. > > Jason > > > >> >> >> -- >> >> >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- >> 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. > > -- > 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. -- 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.
