On Wed, May 10, 2006 at 11:13:27PM +0100, Patrick Leahy wrote:
>
>
> On who invented quantum suicide, the following is from the biography of
> Hugh Everett by Eugene B. Shikhovtsev and Kenneth W. Ford, at
> http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/everett/
>
> "Atheist or not, Everett firmly believed that his many-worlds theory
> guaranteed him immortality: His consciousness, he argued, is bound at each
> branching to follow whatever path does not lead to death --- and so on ad
> infinitum. (Sadly, Everett's daughter Liz, in her later suicide note, said
> she was going to a parallel universe to be with her father...)"
Sadly, because this is based on a total misunderstanding of QTI, I guess.
>
> The reference is to Everett's views in 1979-80, but there is no reason to
> suppose that Everett had only just thought of it at the time. On a
> personal note, some time in the '80s I met one of Everett's co-workers who
> told me that Everett used to justify his very unhealthy lifestyle on
> exactly these grounds. In our world, Everett died of a heart attack aged
> 52.
>
> I have always assumed that John Bell was thinking along these lines when
> he commented on Everett's theory:
>
> "But if such a theory was taken seriously it would hardly be possible to
> take anything else seriously." (1981, reprinted in _Speakable &
> Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics).
>
These dates all mesh with Don Page's anecdote about Ed Teller :
immortality consequences widely known, but rarely talked about by the
early '80s.
> For that matter, this idea is implicit in Borges' story "The Garden of
> Forking Paths" (written before 1941), which provides the epigraph to the
> DeWitt & Graham anthology on The Many Worlds Interpretation.
>
> ======================================================
> Dr J. P. Leahy, University of Manchester,
> Jodrell Bank Observatory, School of Physics & Astronomy,
> Macclesfield, Cheshire SK11 9DL, UK
> Tel - +44 1477 572636, Fax - +44 1477 571618
Very interesting. Its a shame my manuscript is already at the
printers, I would have loved this for my background info on QTI.
--
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