On 08 Jan 2013, at 15:50, Richard Ruquist wrote:
On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 1:47 AM, Anna <[email protected]> wrote:
Humble coin toss thrust to heart of multiverse debate
02 January 2013 by Jacob Aron
Magazine issue 2898. Subscribe and save
For similar stories, visit the Cosmology Topic Guide
WHY is there a 1 in 2 chance of getting a tail when you flip a coin?
It may seem like a simple question, but the humble coin toss is now
at the heart of a lively row about the multiverse. At stake is the
ability to calculate which, of an infinite number of parallel
universes, is the one that we inhabit.
The debate comes in the wake of a paper posted online a couple of
weeks ago by cosmologists Andreas Albrecht and Daniel Phillips, both
at the University of California, Davis. They argue that conventional
probability theory, the tool we all use to quantify uncertainty in
the real world, has no basis in reality (arxiv.org/abs/1212.0953).
Instead, all problems in probability are ultimately about quantum
mechanics. "Every single time we use probability successfully, that
use actually comes from quantum mechanics," says Albrecht.
I have given the following exercise some time ago. How long need you
to shake a certain volume containing a dice to be sure (by the SWE)
that you will end up with a six outcomes/branches wave solution,
having reasonably equivalent measure?
It is true that the Heisenberg Uncertainties will add up, but to get
the 1/6 realized quantum mechanically, I think you have to shake them
during a non negligible time.
But I do agree with the author above that even if you don't shake the
dice a lot, you will get QM branches with all outcomes (but some more
than others). This is trivial, as there is also a branch where the
dice transform into a white rabbit (but with a very low QM measure).
All that are open problem in computer science (once we decide to work
in the comp theory).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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