Re: The weirdness of the Many Worlds Interpretation

From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Jul 03 2003 - 21:26:54 MDT

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    At 12:54 PM 7/4/03 +1000, Brett wrote:

    >are you saying that in alternative
    >universes under MW's a meteorite strike can happen or not but that
    >cancer is a given in all of them? This seems pretty bizarre.

    Yeah, if the Robert Weinberg model of stochastic inappropriate activation
    or damage to oncogenes is right, cancer isn't inevitable (unless the
    measure is somehow *defined* by one's exact cellular history to date).
    Still more likely that you'll get cancer than be struck by a meteorite,
    though.

    On the topic of the MWI, I put forward the following, from a crotchety
    quantum mechanic on another list who inveighs against relative state
    interpretations. Here's one nub of his case. I'd like to hear a reasoned
    defence of MW from someone up to the task:

    =================

    Many Universes: originally/more correctly, Relative State Interpretation
    that fundamentally cannot reproduce the probabilities (Everett introduced
    the artifact that the branching is probabilistic!). Try out the branching
    problem.
    [This refers to a scientist in each state trying to do experiments to test
    out the predicted probabilities of his QM manyworld. with a state
    vector that has 2 components with coefficients at psi1*psi1 = 0.9 and the
    second at psi2*psi2 = 0.1. After three experiments, there would be 11 of the
    16 branches in which the scientist(s) would be saying there is less than a
    0.05 chance that this quantum mechanics is correct. With time, the percent
    of universes in which the scientist(s) could still vouch for his(their) QM
    would approach zero. The chance that we could live in a universe that
    accepts QM is zero.]

    =============================

    Damien Broderick



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