I guess I’ve always been confused by the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics and the fact that it’s taken seriously. Like is there any proof at all that universes outside of our own exist?
I admit that I might be dumb, but, how does one look at atoms and say “My God! There must be many worlds than just our one?”
I just never understood how Many Worlds Interpretation was valid, with my, admittedly limited understanding, it just seemed to be a wild guess no more strange than a lot things we consider too outlandish to humor.
deleted by creator
Thank you for making the point so cleanly. I was about to piss a lot of people off
You can probabilistically prove the many worlds exist, because it implies quantum immortality. Just connect a short-half-life Schrödinger mechanism to a nuclear bomb, and some of you will survive for a statistically impossible number of half lives. That version of you will have proven the many worlds to be true.
deleted by creator
Except you might be the person who survives!
Except you might be the person who survives!
Except you might be the version who survives!
I don’t think it proves many worlds any more than it proves you have a fairy godmother manipulating quantum states for you. All you’ve done is shown an unlikely occurrence happened, not what caused it.
That’s all science is. Collect data, and show how it’s unlilely unless your hypothesis is true. Five sigma later, and you’ve made a discovery.
The quantum immortality experiment doesn’t do that, though. The outcome, by definition, always occurs within the realm of random chance. Your environment needs to create an outcome that is extremely unlikely to occur by random chance. The experiment is not repeatable. It makes no predictions about what’s going to happen if you try again. It doesn’t do anything useful to bolster the many worlds theory.
If you survive 32 half lives, I’d call that extremely unlikely! Give a try.
The experiment, as defined, only leads to your survival by random chance. The experiment does not create any outcome except by random chance so it cannot be used to prove anything.
Every half life you survive is an experiment.
The chance you’ll survive a half life is exactly the same whether MWI is real or not. It doesn’t give you any useful information. You have no way of distinguishing between being just that lucky or MWI being true.
That’s not the case with other experiments. If you assume your hypothesis is correct, the chance of the experiment being successful is higher than the chance of it happening by random chance if your hypothesis is not. That’s a key difference.
Great answer, but it unfortunately is taken seriously. The reason is because it is an “end of the road” hypothesis. It tells you all the weirdness is fundamental and no further thought is required. Just like good old Copenhagen. The unfalsifiability is a virtue here, it’s a complete explanatin without the messy testing. Now stop thinking, shut up, and calculate.
To be clear, the reason Many Worlds hypothesis exists in the first place is because it’s a possible solution to the calculations. It’s not that someone just came up with an idea to get out of doing real work. It’s just unfortunate when the universe puts multiple possible solutions out of reach of experimentation. But hey, there was a long time of history where virtually any belief about the composition of the moon was considered unfalsifiable.
The “solutions” are not out of reach. Just do the experiment more than once, like any statistical theory.
The moon thing: yes because it was hard to get to, not impossible in principle. If the moon was in a parallel universe your analogy wouldn’t be irrelevant.