On Wed, Feb 5, 2025 at 1:42 PM Alan Grayson <agrayson2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> *there is no interaction between branches and there is no causal > link.* > > *>> True. And that is exactly why those independent branches of the > Universal Wave Function can be thought of as independent worlds. * > > > > *And why the MWI is unverifiable and tantamount to a fantasy. AG* > *Unverifiable is not synonymous with fantasy. Many theories make unverifiable predictions, but that is not how they are judged, they are judged by the number of verifiable predictions that have been experimentally proven to be correct, and if even one **verifiable prediction has been proven to be wrong then the scientific method judges the theory to be wrong. By that criteria Schrodinger's equation has proven itself to be a huge success. So it would be foolish to place those unverifiable other worlds that a super successful equation predicts in the same category as a Harry Potter novel. * *Also, I am absolutely convinced, from the mathematics and from the fact that it's been experimentally verified, that the quantum bomb tester works, it really is possible to use a photon to detect the presence of an object without the photon interacting with the object or the object interacting with the photon; BUT without those other worlds it's impossible, at least for me, to have an intuitive understanding of WHY it works. I could say the same thing about the Quantum Zeno Effect.* *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 whatsoever 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 yourself 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 never fundamentally impossible. * *If forming a mental picture about what's going on in a physical process is not important to you then Shut Up And Calculate (a.k.a. Copenhagen, a.k.a. Bayes) is fine, but personally I'd like a little bit more.* *Quantum Zeno effect* <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Zeno_effect> * John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>* zeq > -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv00qtQ%2BOW7RbX1DUQC9dEhwpJCibczBw_cQQJ9mXv9FcQ%40mail.gmail.com.
