On Fri, Aug 8, 2025 at 4:57 PM Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
> *> So did you ask it how MWI deals with continuous splitting, as in > detecting the decay of radioactive atoms?* > *No I did not. However on November 17, 2024 I sent the following to this list that was about Many Worlds and radioactive decay: * *====================== * *"Nobody needed an interpretation of classical physics, nobody needed a definition of "measurement" or "observer" because regardless of the old cliché about a watched pot never boiling, the time it takes to boil a pot of water really doesn't change depending on if you are watching it or not, but in the weird quantum world you really CAN delay the decay of a radioactive atom if you watch it closely enough, and Many Worlds has no problem explaining how this "Quantum Zeno Effect" works. * *Suppose an atom has a half-life of one second and I'm watching it, the universe splits and so do I after one second. In one universe the atom decays and I observed that the atom has decayed, in the other universe the atom has not decayed and I observed that it has not decayed. * *In the universe where the atom didn't decay after another second the universe splits again, and again in one universe it decays but in the other it has not, it survived for 2 full seconds. So there will be a version of me that observes this atom, which has a one second half-life, surviving for 3 seconds, and 4 seconds, and 5 years, and 6 centuries, and you name it. By utilizing a series of increasingly complex and difficult procedures it is possible for the lab (and you) to be in the universe that contains labs and versions of you that see the atom surviving for an arbitrarily long length of time. But the longer the time past its half-life the more splits are involved, and the more difficult the experiment becomes. **Soon it becomes ridiculously impractical to go further, but it's not impossible. * *Quantum Zeno effect* <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Zeno_effect> *The useful role that Many Worlds provides is that it doesn't need to explain what a "measurement" or an "observer" is, nor does it need to explain exactly, or even approximately, where the Heisenberg cut is. And it doesn't need to explain what consciousness is because it has nothing to do with it." * =============== *John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>* 464 > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0KPfnbvnE5vazqtKyReq1DDKzJ7ezdEuJtAwPy8r1Y-g%40mail.gmail.com.
