On Mon, Feb 10, 2025 at 9:25 AM Bruce Kellett <bhkellet...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 10, 2025 at 8:49 AM Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au> > wrote: > >> On Thu, Feb 06, 2025 at 11:38:52AM +1100, Bruce Kellett wrote: >> > >> > Many worlds theory does not have any comparable way of relating >> probabilities >> > to the properties of the wave function. In fact, if all possibilities >> are >> > realized on every trial, the majority of observers will get results that >> > contradict the Born probabilities. >> > >> >> I'm not sure what you mean by "contradict", but the majority of >> observers will get results that lie within one standard deviation of >> the expected value (ie mean) according to the distribution of Born >> probabilities. If this is what you mean by "contradict", then you are >> trivially correct, but uninteresting. If you mean the above statement >> is false according to the MWI, then I'd like to know why. It sure >> doesn't seem so to me. >> > > It does depend on what value you take for N, the number of trials. In the > limit of very large N, the law of large numbers does give the result you > suggest. But for intermediate values of N, MWI says that there will always > be branches for which the ratio of successes to N falls outside any > reasonable error bound on the expected Born value. > > This problem has been noted by others, and when asked about it, Carroll > simply dismissed the poor suckers that get results that invalidate the Born > Rule as just poor unlucky suckers. Sure, in a single world system, there is > always a small probability that you will get anomalous results. But that is > always a small probability. Whereas, in MWI, there are always such branches > with anomalous results, even for large N. The difference is important. > > The other point is that the set of branches obtained in Everettian many > worlds is independent of the amplitudes, or the Born probabilities for each > outcome, so observations on any one branch cannot be used as evidence, > either for or against the theory. > > See the articles by Adrian Kent and David Albert in "Many Worlds: Everett, > Quantum Theory, and Reality"(OUP, 2010) Edited by Saunders, Barrett, Kent, > and Wallace. > I forgot to add that Kent's paper is also available on arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/0905.0624 > Bruce > -- 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/CAFxXSLR-tDxPJNxtWvQVSBv8-2V7CZQijv04w4YzXjG2CRdhMQ%40mail.gmail.com.
