LizR wrote:
On 22 November 2014 09:31, Richard Ruquist <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Collapse is necessary if you wish to conserve energy.
I've been trying to follow this, but I still don't get why this is so,
or thought to be so. Is there a simple explanation that even I can grasp?
If you have a particle of a certain evergy and you measure its spin
projection, then in each world you get a certain result, but the
particle still carries all the energy of the original particle. So if
there are two possible spin states, then you have created two worlds,
each of which has all the energy of the original. That is the sense in
which energy is not conserved.
The answer according to MWI advocates, at least as I have understood it,
is that just as probabilities have to be renormalized in each of the
daughter worlds, so does energy have to be renormalized. The probability
of spin up was 0.5 pre-measurement, but once you observe the result
'up', the probability is renormalized to unity. Similarly, the energy
could have been expected to be 50% of the original, but renormalization
restores this to 100% in each world.
If you believe in MWI, believing in this renormalization is not such a
stretch.....
Bruce
It seems to me that if you have fungible universes which diverge (as in
FOR) then you already have a continuum of particles available, and these
get shared out when the universes diverge. But they get shared out
continuously - we have a continuum of universes and a continuum of
particles...
(At this point I try to follow what's happening and my head explodes, as
in "Scanners")
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