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