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Natural Science Forum / Physics / Research / December 2007Question about Everett's Quantum Theory
I ask this question only of believers in Everett's many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. How small an event will be accompanied by a splitting into (two?, many?) worlds? Is there a world where some protozoan flicks its flagellum and one where it doesn't? Is there a third world where the flagellum moves only a little bit? Is there a "splitting" (fracturing?) into infinitely many worlds, each in which the flagellum moves a bit more or less than in the others? How tiny (trivial) a thing is accompanied by splitting? How much tinier an event ISN'T accompanied by splitting? If there is such a critical size event what determines its scale? If an arbitrarily small event is adequate why isn't there splitting into infinitely many worlds at every instant? How does a formalism in continuous mathematics give rise to discrete behavior? On Dec 6, 1:37 pm, jones...@emporia.edu wrote: > I ask this question only of believers in Everett's many worlds > interpretation of quantum mechanics. [quoted text clipped - 14 lines] > How does a formalism in continuous mathematics give rise to discrete > behavior? I don't think the splitting is to be discrete. On Dec 7, 10:50 am, "Chris H. Fleming" <chris_h_flem...@yahoo.com> wrote: > On Dec 6, 1:37 pm, jones...@emporia.edu wrote: > [quoted text clipped - 20 lines] > > - Show quoted text - So at every instant there are infinitely many worlds "spun off"? Each a tiny bit different from all of the rest? >So at every instant there are infinitely many worlds "spun off"? Each >a tiny bit different from all of the rest? In the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics (the one that's often called the "many-worlds" interpretation), there's just one wavefunction for the Universe, and it always evolves continuously according to the Schrodinger equation. There are no specific events associated with the "splitting" of this wavefunction into multiple "worlds," despite what some popularizations of the theory imply. It's neither possible nor useful to try to count the number of "worlds" associated with the wavefunction at any given time. There's just the wavefunction doing its thing. -Ted  Signature[E-mail me at name@domain.edu, as opposed to name@machine.domain.edu.] On Dec 8, 11:53 am, eb...@lfa221051.richmond.edu wrote: > In article <7d53535d-2ede-4222-94f4-4d673c4f4...@w40g2000hsb.googlegroups.com>, > [quoted text clipped - 13 lines] > > -Ted I was under the impression that the effective "splitting" is an illusion of one's relative observer status in the wavefunction. |
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