On 1/25/2021 5:39 AM, Alan Grayson wrote:
On Wednesday, January 20, 2021 at 12:59:02 PM UTC-7 Brent wrote: On 1/20/2021 3:58 AM, John Clark wrote:On Wed, Jan 20, 2021 at 12:01 AM Alan Grayson <[email protected]> wrote: >> No, there are *NOT*exactly 10 winners! There are an astronomical number to an astronomical power number horses that won that race with only a submicroscopic difference between them, and there are also an astronomical number to an astronomical power number of Alan Graysons that won his bet on that race. /> So instead of all possible outcomes being measured in some other world,/ Except for its simplicity the most important advantage of many worlds is that it doesn't have to explain what "measured" means, or what a "observer" means, or what a "choice" means because in many worlds ANY physical change of any sort causes the Universe to split.That sounds like a bug not a feature. Does every C14 decay in your body instantiate a different world? Every photon that's absorbed by that chlorophyll molecule instead of that other molecule? As Bruno says, "World" and "Universe" become hard to define. If you say "This universe." does it mean anything, even for a moment? But it you can't give meaning to "This" how can you make sense of an experiment in which "This" evolves into "That"? You need some way to talk about the quasi-classical world, because as Bohr noted, that's where we live and that's where science predicts things. BrentNow you know why I call the MWI "Trump Physics". Its advocates will never admit it's woefully wrong, like our hopefully departed "leader" who never admits a mistake. Another example of this utter foolishness; note the numerous worlds created by ants which move along in repeated zig-zags. AG
I think you get entirely to worked up over it. We have a theory that has a huge domain of application. Is predictive and extremely accurate. The only problem is the interpretation of the processes described by the mathematics. Interpretations are not theories. They are not right or wrong, because they can't be tested. W.V.O. Quine contributed to this confusion by saying that ontology was the set of entities presupposed by our best theory. That's a philosopher's view. I seems to make the questions of Hilbert space or C*-algebra, discrete or continuous, Turing computable or not, into important questions of what really, really exists. That's the wrong attitude. It's the error of the misplaced concrete. Feynmann had it right when he said,"Every good physicists knows five different ways to express the same physics in mathematics." The function of interpretations is to suggest better theories. Better theories are ones with bigger domains and more accurate predictions. First we get better knowledge of facts; then we can worry about the ontology later. That's why I say epistemology precedes ontology.
Everett saw that there was a gap in QM. Measurement wasn't really given a physical description. The collapse of the wave function was just stuck in by hand. So he tried to fill it in. This led to the study of decoherence and a better theory of measurement. It provides some definition of the Heisenberg cut. I think it still leaves a small gap. MWI advocates think it's complete. But it's an interpretation...it's not true or false. What will lead to unification with gravity and spacetime is the interesting question.
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