This website, the app's visual design, and that old plastic-chromed iPhone all harken back to a simpler time when there were funny one-off apps just for the hell of it.
The time of $1.99 quantum splitters, $0.99 iBeer, and $1.99 Lightsaber apps is long gone. Most of those apps didn't really do anything all that amazing, but looking back on it I think I miss when app stores were flush with "we could use the hardware to do this" rather than "we could get in-app purchases and subscriptions like this"
Not that there wasn't monetization as a goal back then, but just that there was a lot of weird paradigms being experimented on where we now have a solidly 10-year norm instead.
I don't even enjoy surfing the app stores nowadays. Anything resembling fun feels like a trap. Either an app with a hidden agenda, or an attempt to rope you into a subscription. Or some otherwise ad filled jank. Just not fun anymore. That goes for most anything with a CPU, really.
Browse F-Droid. It's still often janky but at least you don't get traps, hidden agendas, or ads.
The same goes for Linux distro repositories, except there's less jank. I think there's something about Android that's hostile to creating quality software, maybe that it's so hard to make Android software at all that making it quality is just too much effort.
100% with you on this. The number of games that end up being bejeweled clones (now with ads, yes we know you paid, but not the subscription!) is soul-crushing.
I bought this App when was mentioned by Sean Carroll in one of his talks/podcast about quantum computing. And because of that, I really thought that they did something that was founded in quantum physics. Not that it was really important, but it was cool to say "see, now it's contacting LHC to shot another photon The only think that I'm sorry about is that with every change of iPhone I've lost the track of what Universe I am!
Deliberate or not, the proprietors of commercial computing platforms do display a disturbingly consistent tendency to segregate their customers into "users" and "developers", to the harm of all.
On that topic, I can highly recommend a Sci-Fi novella called "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" by Ted Chiang (the movie Arrival is based on one of his other novels). Concerns a device that also splits the universe, but allows a limited amount of information transfer between the two splits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety_Is_the_Dizziness_of_Fr...
I've read a terrifying short story about that once. It was about a man that never died. The universe just grew ever more unlikely and absurd around him due to quantum immortality.
In "Ilium/Olympos" by Dan Simmons, the post-human society is riddled with quantum magic. Achilles has had his future narrowed down to two possibilities: dying at a specific time after being shot in the heel by an arrow shot by Paris, or dying of old age in bed.
The idea if quantum immortality was one of the first things I thought when I read about multiple universes.
I never did research on it an it was just a week ago that I heard this was "a thing" but it wasn't a sound theory, for all the reasons that wiki article mentions.
I guess, I wanted to live with the thought that it was possible, that's why I never researched about it.
Thanks for the link, I imagined that my life would become like in the story too, lol.
I don't think you want to believe that it's possible.
There was a short story once without science fiction trappings, more fantasy/horror, where someone observes that the gravedigger in a small southern town always knows to dig a grave in advance. He asks what happens if the graves aren't dug, and he's told they have to be.
He plays a game of guessing who a grave will be for, but one day he's told that he'll never guess this time, and then he learns his parents were in a car crash. There's one grave, presumably for one or the other of them.
So he murders the gravedigger with his shovel, buries him in the grave that was dug for another, and both of his parents survive.
But then nobody in the town dies. His mother is paralyzed, and there's still hope, but then she has a stroke. And then there's a big fire. And nobody dies.
Finally, he takes the gravediggers tools, which have been inconspicuously following him around, and goes and digs all the needed graves.
The end of the story is that he's now old and worn out and looking forward to resting after spending many years as the new gravedigger.
Same here, although I worried (still worry) of the conceivable possibility of dead-end branches where death becomes logically inevitable for some reason, that the laws of physics don’t always provide an escape route.
On the other hand, I tell myself that empirically it’s always only other people that die, never oneself.
>the conceivable possibility of dead-end branches where death becomes logically inevitable for some reason
Wouldn't that be all deaths? If "dying" is a single quantum event, then by the time it happens, death in the ordinary sense has been finalized.
We're not atomic particles. Even if I stand at ground zero at a nuclear explosion, I can't expect to be saved by some improbable malfunction of the bomb, because as instant as the explosion seems, I don't vanish instantly, even if it's faster than nerves can react.
Normal probability and physical law should apply until the bomb irretrievably has gone off and I'm almost completely vaporized. The only way to resurrect me would be to essentially recreate me from scratch, and a universe around me.
I once wrote up about this thought experiment and some of its variants. I particularly recommend the discussion it generated on Reddit for may interesting viewpoints (link towards the end of the post).
There’s a short story out there about a device that can actually do this and then let you stay in contact with your alternate self for a while to see how things turn out. Fascinating stuff.
There's another short story out there which assumes that when you die in one branched universe, you survive in another. So in your subjective experience, you always survive, no matter how low the chances. But eventually your survival requires stranger and stranger events to occur. After a thousand years, your subjective experience becomes utterly implausible, and yet there you are. But you may not like the universe in which you survive that long. Which is too bad, because you can't subjectively die.
I'll probably remember the title tomorrow, if nobody beats me to it. It was a fairly disturbing story.
Ah, thank you! That is it. Just as biting and dark as I remember it.
Greg Egan also has a number of stories about people who rebelled against a "many worlds" universe by porting human cognition to run on "Quantum Single Processors," which would carefully isolate themselves from the universe until they had made a single decision across every possible timeline. This didn't prevent them from being "branched" by outside factors, but it at least gave them an approximation of free will.
Greg Egan writes true sci-fi. Exploring what-ifs further than anyone has explored them, and putting them up in story format so you don't have to be Einstein.
I think MWI is appealing to a lot of people as part of the quiet, but ever-present undercurrent of "how can we make any sort of God totally unnecessary to the universe?" that science has, but if you think about it deeply enough, it becomes clear that MWI, if true, is unbelievably horrible. We'd all better hope it's not the correct interpretation.
Edit: Thanks for the link to the story. I had not read it or seen it before. Same principles for sure. I don't think it's a crazy extrapolation of MWI, I think it's the only logical outcome. I can put that opinion into more firm mathematical language but it's more than I can put into an HN comment, and I haven't typed it out anywhere else either, and it really is just that opinion, in more mathematical language.
Having a slew of physical theories with profound existential ramifications to choose from, why do you think the "many-worlds interpretation" is particularly connected to secularization?
As far as I’m concerned, believing in MWI is the realization that causality is not a function, but a relation (in the mathematical sense), and that actually feels more natural and inuitive, all things considered.
I think there was also a concept for scientifically testing the MWI, but that only works subjectively. You essentially play Russian roulette, preferably based on the outcomes of a quantum measurement. Repeat until you either die or are satisfied that the world you are in is so implausible as to be impossible unless indeed every outcome is realised.
Say, fire an electron at a double slit with a detector in one of the slits, and kill yourself if the particle is not detected. Run the experiment 10,000 times, or 100,000,000 times - one copy of you will eventually be satisfied that in any probabilistic interpretation of QM this is not plausible, and all the other copies will be dead.
This works because the MWI predicts that any outcome that has non-0 probability according to the Born rule will be guaranteed to happen (it just "happens less" by some hard to define metric).
Personally I believe the entire notion is absurd, and that this type of thought experiment makes it clear, but still some like to be contrary.
I arrived at this philosophy independently, so I tend to subscribe to it. Along the lines of The Secret and manifestation, I've noticed that whatever we think about tends to happen in reality (as above, so below).
So the main difference between someone like a Buddhist monk and a former US president with a taste for gold is one of choice. The monk acknowledges that all routes to living one's best life are possible so abstains from attaching to outcomes too strongly, while the former president asserts his ego to maximize a certain dimension like personal wealth at the expense of all the others. Too much choice and we risk being ungrounded, too little choice and we end up caught in a web of our own design.
There's a great scene on the show Vikings where Ragnar says:
Power is only given to those who are prepared to lower themselves to pick it up.
Really everything is possible, and we can use our will to sidestep into other realities. But from a framework of reincarnation and the multiverse, our choices can impose on the freedoms of others, so we should be mindful of the impacts of our decisions, because others are aspects of ourselves in another life.
I feel rather strongly that most of the world's problems like wealth inequality and war stem from overexertion of the ego. People constrain themselves into corners and then project their anxieties onto others to the point where it seems like nobody gets to live their best life.
It seems like retaining the information about all possible universes is kind of nonsensical; the volume of data is just too large.
If we assume that the universe is deterministic inside of itself except for quantum decisions, it seems reasonable to me that a structure on the outside of this universe would perform something like a Monte Carlo tree search (assuming that there is a "success condition" for a universe), and branches are only explored to some depth before being discarded. You could then - if you really had to - backtrack to an earlier known state and start exploring again.
In my general view, it's also likely that consciousness is only projected into branches once it's sufficiently established that they're reasonable to follow (I think consciousness might be expensive).
I think it's much cleaner to assume all possible realities exist - otherwise you have to account for the fact that some do not exist.
Why would there be some possible realities and not others?
Much cleaner to assume that all possible realities exist.
Then when you ask, why is there not just nothing? You can answer, why would there be nothing rather than something? Is that not a special case? It is a special case and requires a cause to make it nothing rather than something.
And so we arrive at the concept of the void. That which is not nothing but rather all potentialities simultaneously. True nothing and everything are very similar.
What is the state of maximum disorder? A signal that is completely random. It's algorithmic complexity must be maximal. The program to describe it must be maximal and so within it, it contains all possible machines. All possible constructions, all universes.
Nothing is everything and so it is not possible to have nothing, and so the universe exists.
QED
Where's my Nobel?
Why would being "cleaner" make any difference for the likelihood of a theory? Isn't "clean" just a made-up concept that merely means "pleasant" to the human mind?
I don't see how "all cases" is any more likely than "one case".
Human intuition has been completely inconsistent with observed reality since relativity and QM were conceived. We should use other means to evaluate the Many Worlds idea.
1) Where is all of the mass/energy coming from? Why is it ok to throw all conservation laws out the window and double the universe whenever two quanta get too close to one another?
2) What's up with locality? Does the spilt somehow radiate outwards from the splitting event at the speed of light? Or do we end up with an instantaneous non-local forking of the universe?
Regarding 1), you just need to think about conservation laws as being many worlds "blind".
Let's assume that we devise an experiment that we 100% prove would split the universe in 3 versions. Executing that experiments splits world 1 into world 1a, 1b, and 1c. Conservations laws will state that the total energy in world 1a == total energy in world 1b == total energy in world 1c == total energy in world 1.
Assume that you have a measurement device that is not "many world" aware, you can only measure the total energy in world 1 - before the experiment takes place - and - depending on which many world "version" you measure afterwards - the total energy in world 1a OR world 1b OR world 1c. According to the measurement device, conservation laws will be respected. Even tho the world was split.
Currently, all our measurement devices are not many world aware, and are only able to measure physical properties in one world version. This makes it extremely hard - impossible in fact - to fully prove that other universe exist in parallel. If we were able to build a measurement device that is able to have some kind of "total value across world 1a, 1b and 1c", that would be a game changer, and conservations laws would probably not apply for that device. So far we haven't been able to build one, so conservations laws are considered universal.
This is not an answer to the question. The implication from what you said is that the law of conservation of matter and energy is not true when applied to “universe splitting”. Which comes back to the original question. So where does it come from?
I assume that proponents of many worlds have an answer for this, though I don’t know what it is. I am doubtful that it’s “magic” or just “conservation does not apply”.
> conservations laws would probably not apply for that device
The law of conservation applies to the universe, not the measurement device.
A little bit of googling reveals that I am not the only person to have this question.
To summarize some answers:
a) Energy is conserved by anyone performing an actual observation, therefore energy is conserved. (I suppose this is the 'shut up and calculate' answer.)
b) MWI worlds are actually entirely separate non-interacting universes that just happen to have the exact same history up to the moment of 'divergence.' Therefore energy is conserved.
(But why does world B exist in the first place, waiting around for this specific point of divergence? Are there just so many universes lying around that we're guaranteed to be able to find two that reflect both sides of a given coin flip? Or are the many-worlds realizable as the 'closure' of events from any given world-line?)
But I suppose all of this points at MWI being internally consistent but deeply unsatisfying. Any attempt to chase implications puts you in 'we can't answer why' territory.
I’m very much a layperson in this context but those seem like nonsense answers.
a) If we’re proposing that we need an observer then this is certainly no simpler than the Copenhagen interpretation.
b) I fail to see how this works. There happen to be an infinitude of parallel worlds that only shows up to make individual calculations convenient. It doesn’t seem consistent that those universes would exist to make calculations convenient until the movement of “divergence” and then suddenly they no longer affect later calculations.
For (b), imagine a set S of all possible universes. Then the two universes that agree perfectly up to the chosen event and then diverge are certainly both in S. And since they are non-interacting, there's no problem with energy conservation.
FWIW, the existence of infinite universes to justify calculations also strikes me as deeply unsatisfying...
I don’t have any trouble with the two universes, conceptually. I have trouble with the infinite others. I don’t understand the idea that the two convenient universes are represented by the wave function, but the infinite inconvenient ones are not.
But maybe the answer is that all universes are somehow represented by the wave function and I just don’t understand the implications. This might indeed be the case.
I tend to agree that this is deeply unsatisfying, regardless. Many worlds is interesting but also feels extremely far fetched. It honestly feels a little bit like “we don’t understand this yet, must be magic”.
We’ve invoked an extremely complicated phenomenon to answer a gap in our understanding. And maybe it’s true, but that’s what ancient astronomers thought about the wild paths planets took, too. “The math works out with circles in circles. Occam’s razor, amiright Ptolemy?”
Just an observation here. Our experience is within spacetime, but some discussions indicate there are processes outside of spacetime. Some say dark energy, for example, is the expansion of spacetime and not the motions of objects inside it. Maybe MW is not operating inside either, while conservation and locality are.
> It seems like retaining the information about all possible universes is kind of nonsensical; the volume of data is just too large.
Do you have to retain all the information? Perhaps a set of quantum events is more like a parameter into a function, and the return value is the universe state corresponding to that history. Yeah there's magical black box handwaving going on there but the point is when we literally have no idea, it's not entirely impossible that the quantum multiverse is sparsely populated and lazy loaded with nothing 'computed' into existence until it has to be.
EDIT: Mind, I'm not saying that it is this way. The validity of my proposal isn't the point. The point is that dismissing Many Worlds on the grounds of "too much information" involves assuming a lot of things we don't actually know.
The "split universes" is the new science fiction that took the world by storm. It is an unproven hypothesis that satisfies the psychological needs of people who want to dream of a world that behaves according to their wishes.
Unless you yourself have a good and detailed understanding of quantum mechanics, and have solved the Schrodinger equation for many different systems, I'd recommend not assuming that the physicists who proposed many worlds did so out of some psychological need to have the universe look like a branching tree.
The true situation is that the Schrodinger equation straightforwardly predicts a proliferation of worlds when you start from a low-entropy state. (Worlds in this interpretation are actually continuous blobs of amplitude, not discrete objects, which is why it makes sense that a partial differential equation like the Schrodinger equation can describe them. The prediction is that blobs will tend to spread out, split into smaller blobs, etc.) Early quantum physicists were disturbed by this, and added a collapse postulate claiming that the wave-function will sometimes spontaneously collapse, resulting in a single, linear world history rather than a branching one. To this day, spontaneous collapse has never been observed in an experiment.
My understanding is that the reason why the multiverse hypothesis (Everett interpretation) is popular with physicists is it simplifies the equations without losing predictive power. They actually have to add terms for the Copenhagen interpretation. I admittedly don't know the math well, but I think suggesting that it satisfies psychological needs is not generally accurate -- if anything, I think the average person finds the idea uncomfortable. Rather, it has legitimate explanatory and predictive power.
I hate when Occam's razor is applied to non-scientific domains, but this is clearly a scientific domain, and it applies here - multiverse theory is the simpler of the two explanations.
Occam's razor is not a law. It is just a heuristic to consider scientific hypothesis. If you believe something just because of Occam's razor (without any other evidence) I would say this is not very scientific.
You are making a couple mistakes here. The first is that you are arguing with a straw man. I never said anything about it being a law. I also never said Occam's razor is science itself - I said that it's a tool to be applied in the scientific domain.
The second mistake is that you don't seem to understand Occam's razor - yes, it is a heuristic, to determine which theory to weigh as more likely, due to limited time and scientific resources. Furthermore, the idea behind it is that, all else being equal, including available evidence, you choose the simpler theory.
If you had evidence that differentiated the two, you wouldn't need Occam's razor.
But you have to use it to counteract the intuition that only one universe is simpler. Occam's razor is a formal way to tell you, "hey your intuition is wrong, the other theory is the simpler one!" And for it to be useful to you, you can't just allow yourself to say "oh it is just a heuristic" when you don't like what it says. Instead you have to ask "what would I do if I deep down felt that many-worlds was simpler?" and act in accordance.
Occam’s razor means to give less credence for a given theory to be true the more assumptions the theory requires. One can choose to believe in the theory that requires extra assumptions, but, well, that’s making assumptions.
Most likely true, but that doesn't mean it is useless. Adherents to the split universe religi...er...theory might be more content with their lives, experience less anxiety, etc..
Disclaimer: I have no background in physics at all. I saw this universe splitter and read "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" (Science-Fiction novella by Ted Chiang - the one mentioned in here), and thought hey that's fun.
Nice one! Back in 2012 I built the (now defunct) Freakonomics Experiments site[^1] that used had the same A vs. B premise using John Walker's HotBits[^2] from Switzerland.
In case of interest, Steven Levitt published their - albeit single-Universal - findings in "Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness"[^3]
How about a RealityOS with duplicate copies ready to be split. When a user faces an A/B options, realities 2, 3, and 4 can go ahead and execute A, B, and cancel so that when the user makes their choice the winning reality is put in focus and the diffs copied to the rest. You could even hover over a button and watch where it ends up. Like pre-fetching from browsers.
Or when a debugger hits a break point reality 2 can proceed with the execution until you are done investigating.
It could even act like a RAID backup in case a random bit flip causes one reality to crash.
Alas it would be quite wasteful to spend watts on hypotheticals...
It's not possible to distinguish between many worlds or any other interpretation, so it will never will be confirmed (nor will the Copenhagen interpretation). The only ones that can be confirmed are the "objective collapse" theories, as they produce very slightly different predictions than normal QM.
> It's not [currently] possible to distinguish between many worlds or any other interpretation so [unless or until that changes] it will never will be confirmed (nor will the Copenhagen interpretation).
Seems like the minimum editorializing to make your statement science and not religion, no?
I would argue that with further knowledge (e.g if we figure out Quantum Gravity), these interpretations will no longer apply at all, as they are equivalent descriptions of an incorrect (or, "effective"/approximate) theory.
It's not that we lack the tools to distinguish between Copenhagen and MW, but that they are designed to be not possible to distinguish. Further science will produce theories who have different interpretations (hopefully, just one :)
I think it's fair to say that if we ever put a full human being into superposition with a large enough environment for decoherence to happen within the experiment, many worlds is all but confirmed.
This relates to an interpretation of QM that I have not personally found much reading material on, the idea that wavefunction collapse is actually just entanglement; that is to say that as soon as a system in a superposition interacts with the outside universe, the outside universe becomes entangled with the system, thus putting the entire universe into a superposition where both outcomes are observed.
That's precisely Many Worlds! The process you describe is a pretty close match for what's called decoherence. Perhaps you'll have more luck with those search terms, there are quite a few really good resources out there. Just be careful to steer clear of the partisans. However much I disagree with them, the shut-up-and-calculate people give the best overall picture, even when describing a particular interpretation.
Is it? For one reason or another I thought there was a distinction, although reading back what I wrote a second time I can't figure out what it would be.
It's interesting to consider the implications of this line of thinking though; it seems like it would imply that causally-disconnected regions of spacetime (i.e. things outside of our light cone) are forever in a superposition of all possible quantum states, from our perspective, among other things.
I listened to a talk by David Deutsch and he talks about creating an quantum computer based AI and then asking the AI if there are other worlds - (hope I'm not remembering this wrong)
This is a common misconception, so if you're just joking I'll prepare myself to be wooshed in the hopes it helps someone else reading this. There is a concept of many universes which permits slightly differing laws of physics (actually different fundamental constants), but many worlds isn't that one. Many Worlds just says that quantum wavefunctions don't collapse. It doesn't posit any "universe" that the Copenhagen interpretation doesn't allow, it just lets them exist side by side.
You sound like you'd be interested in Max Tegmark's "Our Mathematical Universe". There are probably multiple levels of multiverses, and in our local "stack" we have 4, where the Many Worlds mechanism is sitting on level 3. Some don't have this level 3, but may have fewer or more levels, using mechanisms foreign to this multiverse, depending on their laws of physics.
If the single photon simultaneously bounces off the partially-silvered mirror and goes through it, you're not going to get an answer to a binary question from this experimental set-up.
According to the MWI (which is not "prevailing quantum theory") all outcomes of QM experiments are realized, but the experimental apparatus and the rest of the macro world around it become entangled with a particular outcome, and thus unable to perceive the other outcomes.
So after every quantum experiment you get N copies of the world, one in which outcome A has happened, one in which B has happened, one in which outcome C has happened etc, and each of these evolves divergently from there on. Of course, there are trillions of trillions of trillions of "quantum experiments" happening in our immediate surrounding every second, so any one experiment in particular is not that important, but it helps to isolate.
So, instead of taking a decision, you use the app to rest easy that somewhere out there in the universal wave function, there is a copy of you that has taken the opposite decision.
This sounds like one of those ideas that's mathematically very pure but sort of nonsensical otherwise. Basically there are an ~infinite number of universes being created every 1 'units of time' where that unit is ~0.
IDK, I guess the whole speed of light thing is really silly too in a way, but that's provably true.
This just feels really nuts. I guess it's like... where do all of these universes live? I get that our universe expands into whatever, but that seems trivial compared to a theory where every single quantum action leads to a new universe.
Sean Carrol addressed this in his royal institution lecture (a brief history of quantum mechanics, 37m30s). As far as I understood those universes aren't created, you're just selecting a slice of phase space of the (very big) number of possible universes. ( link: https://youtu.be/5hVmeOCJjOU?t=2247 )
If you think Max Tegmark is right, then the universe is just mathematics and space itself is a mathematical structure. Is there a limit on how many mathematical structures can exist?
It doesn’t matter since neither event is connected to the outcome of the test anyway. The user could have chosen the opposite fields for the answers (different universe), or another infinite number of split events prior to using the app, one of which is certainly that the app is a joke.
if this thing is making my choices for me, then why not skip "the middle man" i.e. me?
I sense a rising humanity motion (like rationalism, or the englightnement or whaterver) towards letting the algorithms make all of our choices. The new absolute monarch is the Algorithm. The Kings are dead, long live the algorithms!?
disclaimer: as tha website is not serious but it does pretend to be, my own comment is also not entirely serious.
Often difficult topics are better expressed through fiction (or partial fiction; fiction right now but maybe not later)
this could be a writing prompt template. finding a way to hold two seemingly contradictory beliefs simultaneously is a solid exercise in creative thinking.
The idea is you make the choice decided by the photon. If you don't use the device according to the instructions, any resulting timeline disruption is on you.
I fail to see the point, even if it is connected to some quantum device; it won't make any difference to me, whether my decision is made on a coin-toss or a wave-function collapse.
I can't imagine anyone using this app more than once.
Fun idea, but "according to scientists" and "according to prevailing quantum theory" are questionable. The many worlds interpretation isn't as mainstream as this implies (and many non-physicists think).
Personally I don't think it makes any sense at all, although I have a mere batchelor's degree in physics so I'm not particularly well qualified to judge. I've never had a satisfactory answer to the simple emperor's new clothes question, which requires no knowledge of QM to ask, "If every outcome happens, in what sense is one outcome more probable than another?"
Because it is (experimentally, based on repeat trials), and QM furnishes us with the probabilities.
This is sometimes stated as "How do you get the Born rule?" but it's a simple and obvious question as soon as any sort of multiverse is proposed. I'm aware of the attempts to answer the question using decision theory but while they produce the right numbers they fail to provide a convincing justification for or interpretation of them (vs the simple, experimentally falsifiable frequentist view "if you repeat the experiment you'll see the frequencies approach these probabilities").
One outcome being more probable than another in MW can be interpreted as that outcome being more likely to have occurred in your past. That is also what the frequentist example is measuring, not which outcome is more likely but which outcome is more likely to be in your history.
There is also Quantum Bayseianism in which an outcome being more likely is due to that state being better at copying itself to neighboring states.
In all interpretations (including Copenhagen) the mapping from the unobservable wavefunction is taken as axiom (well, one could argue that Relational QM/Transactional interpretation avoids this, but just adds another axiom).
> Fun idea, but "according to scientists" and "according to prevailing quantum theory" are questionable.
Well it is certainly up there in terms of quantum theory along with the Copenhagen interpretation, and some quantum physicists definitely believe this, so considering it is a joke app and mostly a thought experiment I think we can say these statements are accurate enough.
> I've never had a satisfactory answer to the simple emperor's new clothes question, which requires no knowledge of QM to ask, "If every outcome happens, in what sense is one outcome more probable than another?"
I've never had a satisfactory answer to how a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time with the competing Copenhagen interpretation - however I will leave this debate to researchers in quantum mechanics who understand the maths of quantum physics better than my knowledge of quantum dead cats.
I mean, fair's fair, many worlds doesn't give you probabilities. On the other hand, I'm not convinced saying "and then collapse happens" is an explanation for the Born rule anyway, seeing as collapse is just something magic that turns amplitudes into probability in the same way (mathematically) decoherence does. Meanwhile, collapse remains totally unmoored from the rest of quantum mechanics. It could definitely be decided either way, whether by a satisfying explanation of collapse or a solid explanation for the Born rule, but as of now I'd say the weight of evidence is behind many worlds.
>I mean, fair's fair, many worlds doesn't give you probabilities. On the other hand, I'm not convinced saying "and then collapse happens" is an explanation for the Born rule anyway, seeing as collapse is just something magic that turns amplitudes into probability in the same way (mathematically) decoherence does.
An alternative explanation with as much physical evidence as the Many Worlds (MW) interpretation (i.e., none) could be that we are, in fact, part of a simulation[0] and the "wave function" properties of quanta aren't "real" (what is "real" in a simulation?), but rather are artifacts of speculative execution[1] on the part of the CPU executing the aforementioned simulation.
The idea there being that all possible branches are followed, but only the [correct|selected|randomly arrived at|etc.] events are incorporated into "reality."
That, of course, raises a number of questions:
1. How is it that we can perceive such speculative branch execution from inside a simulation executing on such a CPU?
2. What mechanism (algorithm? [pseudo]-random number generation? lookup table?) would be used to determine "actual" outcome from executing all possible code branches?
3. Like the "Many Worlds" hypothesis, treating quantum uncertainty as an artifact of "speculative execution" of all possible branches of simulation code isn't testable (at least not as far as I'm aware). As such, how do we use the scientific method to identify the most likely scenario?
I'm not advocating the position that we do, in fact, live in a simulation. Nor am I advocating the MW, Copenhagen or even Pilot-wave interpretations.
Rather, my point is that none of these interpretations are "science" in the sense of having falsifiable hypotheses. Unless and until we have the appropriate concepts/technology to test such hypotheses, all are just speculation/metaphysics.
That said, I also think it's useful to examine and (where possible) investigate such hypotheses, as that might give us a better understanding of the universe(s) we occupy.
I respect the basic idea of falsification, but the fact is we routinely draw conclusions despite their being just one of infinite possibilities, all of which are unfalsifiable. The tool we use to distinguish between them is Occam's razor, and with it we can argue for one conclusion or another.
Quantum physicists don't agree on MW, Copenhagen, or weirder hidden-variable type theories. But very few of them are of the opinion that, say, the universe has obeyed the laws of physics until now by chance. It has exactly as much evidence as every other theory, but isn't favored by Occam's razor.
Someone favoring the Copenhagen interpretation would argue that the rest of the waveform is deadweight. Someone favoring MW would say collapse is. I don't know many hidden variable people, but maybe they think probabilities are just more elegant.
Not only are universes operating on each of these theories distinct, there are absolutely things we could discover that would push the balance! Bell's Theorem genuinely hurts the credibility of hidden variable theories. MW would be absolutely deranged without the notion of decoherence. If someone published a paper tomorrow showing why world measure translates into probabilities, I'd call that a big win for MW. If someone found a clever, non-decoherence reason for collapse, it would be a big win for the Copenhagen interpretation.
Regardless, such speculation is far from metaphysics. Overly theoretical? Perhaps. But Newton wasn't doing metaphysics when he proposed gravity, and he was shown to be basically right the instant a handful of elegant equations predicted the motion of the planets.
This website, the app's visual design, and that old plastic-chromed iPhone all harken back to a simpler time when there were funny one-off apps just for the hell of it.
The time of $1.99 quantum splitters, $0.99 iBeer, and $1.99 Lightsaber apps is long gone. Most of those apps didn't really do anything all that amazing, but looking back on it I think I miss when app stores were flush with "we could use the hardware to do this" rather than "we could get in-app purchases and subscriptions like this"
Not that there wasn't monetization as a goal back then, but just that there was a lot of weird paradigms being experimented on where we now have a solidly 10-year norm instead.
I don't even enjoy surfing the app stores nowadays. Anything resembling fun feels like a trap. Either an app with a hidden agenda, or an attempt to rope you into a subscription. Or some otherwise ad filled jank. Just not fun anymore. That goes for most anything with a CPU, really.
Browse F-Droid. It's still often janky but at least you don't get traps, hidden agendas, or ads.
The same goes for Linux distro repositories, except there's less jank. I think there's something about Android that's hostile to creating quality software, maybe that it's so hard to make Android software at all that making it quality is just too much effort.
100% with you on this. The number of games that end up being bejeweled clones (now with ads, yes we know you paid, but not the subscription!) is soul-crushing.
I bought this App when was mentioned by Sean Carroll in one of his talks/podcast about quantum computing. And because of that, I really thought that they did something that was founded in quantum physics. Not that it was really important, but it was cool to say "see, now it's contacting LHC to shot another photon The only think that I'm sorry about is that with every change of iPhone I've lost the track of what Universe I am!
Clearly, you are in the universe where a new iPhone was released.
That there-was-a-time was the-brief-moment-when the iPhone app store was a folk art medium.
Popular folk art is dangerous.
So a bureaucracy was built.
Deliberate or not, the proprietors of commercial computing platforms do display a disturbingly consistent tendency to segregate their customers into "users" and "developers", to the harm of all.
Program or be programmed!
On that topic, I can highly recommend a Sci-Fi novella called "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" by Ted Chiang (the movie Arrival is based on one of his other novels). Concerns a device that also splits the universe, but allows a limited amount of information transfer between the two splits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety_Is_the_Dizziness_of_Fr...
Ted Chiang is a great author. Link to the story: https://onezero.medium.com/anxiety-is-the-dizziness-of-freed...
This is my main data backup app. I sleep soundly knowing that after a total HDD crash my data is still safe and sound on a different timeline.
I believe that works just as well without the app.
You're right and now I realize I must look rather silly. Thankfully there's a timeline where I saved my $1.99.
Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit...
I've read a terrifying short story about that once. It was about a man that never died. The universe just grew ever more unlikely and absurd around him due to quantum immortality.
Edit: Found it. "Divided by infinity": https://www.tor.com/2010/08/05/divided-by-infinity/
In "Ilium/Olympos" by Dan Simmons, the post-human society is riddled with quantum magic. Achilles has had his future narrowed down to two possibilities: dying at a specific time after being shot in the heel by an arrow shot by Paris, or dying of old age in bed.
Interesting.
The idea if quantum immortality was one of the first things I thought when I read about multiple universes.
I never did research on it an it was just a week ago that I heard this was "a thing" but it wasn't a sound theory, for all the reasons that wiki article mentions.
I guess, I wanted to live with the thought that it was possible, that's why I never researched about it.
Thanks for the link, I imagined that my life would become like in the story too, lol.
I don't think you want to believe that it's possible.
There was a short story once without science fiction trappings, more fantasy/horror, where someone observes that the gravedigger in a small southern town always knows to dig a grave in advance. He asks what happens if the graves aren't dug, and he's told they have to be.
He plays a game of guessing who a grave will be for, but one day he's told that he'll never guess this time, and then he learns his parents were in a car crash. There's one grave, presumably for one or the other of them.
So he murders the gravedigger with his shovel, buries him in the grave that was dug for another, and both of his parents survive.
But then nobody in the town dies. His mother is paralyzed, and there's still hope, but then she has a stroke. And then there's a big fire. And nobody dies.
Finally, he takes the gravediggers tools, which have been inconspicuously following him around, and goes and digs all the needed graves.
The end of the story is that he's now old and worn out and looking forward to resting after spending many years as the new gravedigger.
Hah same here. I always imagined that it would be crazy if people always happened to survive in the universes they inhabited.
Same here, although I worried (still worry) of the conceivable possibility of dead-end branches where death becomes logically inevitable for some reason, that the laws of physics don’t always provide an escape route.
On the other hand, I tell myself that empirically it’s always only other people that die, never oneself.
>the conceivable possibility of dead-end branches where death becomes logically inevitable for some reason
Wouldn't that be all deaths? If "dying" is a single quantum event, then by the time it happens, death in the ordinary sense has been finalized.
We're not atomic particles. Even if I stand at ground zero at a nuclear explosion, I can't expect to be saved by some improbable malfunction of the bomb, because as instant as the explosion seems, I don't vanish instantly, even if it's faster than nerves can react.
Normal probability and physical law should apply until the bomb irretrievably has gone off and I'm almost completely vaporized. The only way to resurrect me would be to essentially recreate me from scratch, and a universe around me.
Maybe that's how reincarnation works.
There's also All the Myriad Ways by Larry Niven - https://archive.org/details/Galaxy_v27n03_1968-10/page/n31/m...
To the people that say the idea is false, indeed that it is fictional: why do you think so? Genuine question.
Wow, that was quite a ride, thanks for sharing!
I once wrote up about this thought experiment and some of its variants. I particularly recommend the discussion it generated on Reddit for may interesting viewpoints (link towards the end of the post).
https://www.thoughtexperiments.net/quantum-suicide/
I have been using this for awhile, and am beginning to suspect that it is a hoax, and it is not really being sent to a lab in Geneva.
(Looks at source code, finds HKCD random function..)
The unofficial Android app does an api call: https://github.com/tomicooler/UniverseSplitterUnofficial/blo...
Ahah! The API is sending a request to Canberra, Australia!
I guess that proves that in the alternate universe, Geneva is in Australia!
BTW, if you are into this sort of thing, I got this HDMI cable that lets you connect to a monitor on the "other side": https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B00KY2NKCO/
:)
Heh, heh. But of course.
Just my luck to be in the universe where I have an Android and the app is only for iPhone :(
You are in the correct universe: https://github.com/tomicooler/UniverseSplitterUnofficial
There is an official Android app[0], it's linked on the developer's main page[1]—but weirdly enough not on the homepage.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Aerfish.Un... [1] https://www.aerfish.com/
It's not really a problem. I went ahead and split the universe for you. Between options A and B, you are to select option B.
First time I've came across the Universe Splitter was from This American Life with a good layman explanation.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/691/transcript
There’s a short story out there about a device that can actually do this and then let you stay in contact with your alternate self for a while to see how things turn out. Fascinating stuff.
There's another short story out there which assumes that when you die in one branched universe, you survive in another. So in your subjective experience, you always survive, no matter how low the chances. But eventually your survival requires stranger and stranger events to occur. After a thousand years, your subjective experience becomes utterly implausible, and yet there you are. But you may not like the universe in which you survive that long. Which is too bad, because you can't subjectively die.
I'll probably remember the title tomorrow, if nobody beats me to it. It was a fairly disturbing story.
Ah yes!!! “Divided by infinity”. I had this saved as I like to go back and read it every so often.
https://www.tor.com/2010/08/05/divided-by-infinity/
Ah, thank you! That is it. Just as biting and dark as I remember it.
Greg Egan also has a number of stories about people who rebelled against a "many worlds" universe by porting human cognition to run on "Quantum Single Processors," which would carefully isolate themselves from the universe until they had made a single decision across every possible timeline. This didn't prevent them from being "branched" by outside factors, but it at least gave them an approximation of free will.
Greg Egan writes true sci-fi. Exploring what-ifs further than anyone has explored them, and putting them up in story format so you don't have to be Einstein.
It's not a story, but AFAIK I independently observed that about the MWI of the universe before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22055186
I think MWI is appealing to a lot of people as part of the quiet, but ever-present undercurrent of "how can we make any sort of God totally unnecessary to the universe?" that science has, but if you think about it deeply enough, it becomes clear that MWI, if true, is unbelievably horrible. We'd all better hope it's not the correct interpretation.
Edit: Thanks for the link to the story. I had not read it or seen it before. Same principles for sure. I don't think it's a crazy extrapolation of MWI, I think it's the only logical outcome. I can put that opinion into more firm mathematical language but it's more than I can put into an HN comment, and I haven't typed it out anywhere else either, and it really is just that opinion, in more mathematical language.
Having a slew of physical theories with profound existential ramifications to choose from, why do you think the "many-worlds interpretation" is particularly connected to secularization?
I portrayed it as part of the general trend, not specially connected.
As far as I’m concerned, believing in MWI is the realization that causality is not a function, but a relation (in the mathematical sense), and that actually feels more natural and inuitive, all things considered.
I think there was also a concept for scientifically testing the MWI, but that only works subjectively. You essentially play Russian roulette, preferably based on the outcomes of a quantum measurement. Repeat until you either die or are satisfied that the world you are in is so implausible as to be impossible unless indeed every outcome is realised.
Say, fire an electron at a double slit with a detector in one of the slits, and kill yourself if the particle is not detected. Run the experiment 10,000 times, or 100,000,000 times - one copy of you will eventually be satisfied that in any probabilistic interpretation of QM this is not plausible, and all the other copies will be dead.
This works because the MWI predicts that any outcome that has non-0 probability according to the Born rule will be guaranteed to happen (it just "happens less" by some hard to define metric).
Personally I believe the entire notion is absurd, and that this type of thought experiment makes it clear, but still some like to be contrary.
Only issue is that survival only means non-death. Maybe the experiment doesn't kill you, but puts you in a coma - forever ;)
I arrived at this philosophy independently, so I tend to subscribe to it. Along the lines of The Secret and manifestation, I've noticed that whatever we think about tends to happen in reality (as above, so below).
So the main difference between someone like a Buddhist monk and a former US president with a taste for gold is one of choice. The monk acknowledges that all routes to living one's best life are possible so abstains from attaching to outcomes too strongly, while the former president asserts his ego to maximize a certain dimension like personal wealth at the expense of all the others. Too much choice and we risk being ungrounded, too little choice and we end up caught in a web of our own design.
There's a great scene on the show Vikings where Ragnar says:
Power is only given to those who are prepared to lower themselves to pick it up.
Really everything is possible, and we can use our will to sidestep into other realities. But from a framework of reincarnation and the multiverse, our choices can impose on the freedoms of others, so we should be mindful of the impacts of our decisions, because others are aspects of ourselves in another life.
I feel rather strongly that most of the world's problems like wealth inequality and war stem from overexertion of the ego. People constrain themselves into corners and then project their anxieties onto others to the point where it seems like nobody gets to live their best life.
There's an underrated TV series about (vaguely) this idea called Counterpart:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series)
It functioned well as a spy-sci-fi crossover. But in this universe it got canceled.
I landed in an absurd universe where it looks like the iron curtain will make a comeback soon.
IIRC, Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang had one like that.
Yep. Ted Chaing is a great author. https://onezero.medium.com/anxiety-is-the-dizziness-of-freed...
For the exact opposite of a short story, there is a villain in the web-novel Worm whose power works as a variation of this effect.
> For the exact opposite of a short story,
Ain’t that the truth!
That said, Worm was an amazing story let down a bit by the ending.
"Dear Nia" from exurb1a on YouTube tells a similar story
It seems like retaining the information about all possible universes is kind of nonsensical; the volume of data is just too large.
If we assume that the universe is deterministic inside of itself except for quantum decisions, it seems reasonable to me that a structure on the outside of this universe would perform something like a Monte Carlo tree search (assuming that there is a "success condition" for a universe), and branches are only explored to some depth before being discarded. You could then - if you really had to - backtrack to an earlier known state and start exploring again.
In my general view, it's also likely that consciousness is only projected into branches once it's sufficiently established that they're reasonable to follow (I think consciousness might be expensive).
Some random ranting ...
I think it's much cleaner to assume all possible realities exist - otherwise you have to account for the fact that some do not exist.
Why would there be some possible realities and not others? Much cleaner to assume that all possible realities exist. Then when you ask, why is there not just nothing? You can answer, why would there be nothing rather than something? Is that not a special case? It is a special case and requires a cause to make it nothing rather than something. And so we arrive at the concept of the void. That which is not nothing but rather all potentialities simultaneously. True nothing and everything are very similar. What is the state of maximum disorder? A signal that is completely random. It's algorithmic complexity must be maximal. The program to describe it must be maximal and so within it, it contains all possible machines. All possible constructions, all universes. Nothing is everything and so it is not possible to have nothing, and so the universe exists. QED Where's my Nobel?
It's like someone said: Occam's Razor only likes two numbers: zero and infinity. Any other number on anything needs evidence for why it's this number.
“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”
― Tom Clancy and Mark Twain
Why would being "cleaner" make any difference for the likelihood of a theory? Isn't "clean" just a made-up concept that merely means "pleasant" to the human mind?
I don't see how "all cases" is any more likely than "one case".
This was said verbatim in a TED talk titled "Why does the universe exist"
Human intuition has been completely inconsistent with observed reality since relativity and QM were conceived. We should use other means to evaluate the Many Worlds idea.
Two questions I've long had about many worlds:
1) Where is all of the mass/energy coming from? Why is it ok to throw all conservation laws out the window and double the universe whenever two quanta get too close to one another?
2) What's up with locality? Does the spilt somehow radiate outwards from the splitting event at the speed of light? Or do we end up with an instantaneous non-local forking of the universe?
Regarding 1), you just need to think about conservation laws as being many worlds "blind".
Let's assume that we devise an experiment that we 100% prove would split the universe in 3 versions. Executing that experiments splits world 1 into world 1a, 1b, and 1c. Conservations laws will state that the total energy in world 1a == total energy in world 1b == total energy in world 1c == total energy in world 1.
Assume that you have a measurement device that is not "many world" aware, you can only measure the total energy in world 1 - before the experiment takes place - and - depending on which many world "version" you measure afterwards - the total energy in world 1a OR world 1b OR world 1c. According to the measurement device, conservation laws will be respected. Even tho the world was split.
Currently, all our measurement devices are not many world aware, and are only able to measure physical properties in one world version. This makes it extremely hard - impossible in fact - to fully prove that other universe exist in parallel. If we were able to build a measurement device that is able to have some kind of "total value across world 1a, 1b and 1c", that would be a game changer, and conservations laws would probably not apply for that device. So far we haven't been able to build one, so conservations laws are considered universal.
This is not an answer to the question. The implication from what you said is that the law of conservation of matter and energy is not true when applied to “universe splitting”. Which comes back to the original question. So where does it come from?
I assume that proponents of many worlds have an answer for this, though I don’t know what it is. I am doubtful that it’s “magic” or just “conservation does not apply”.
> conservations laws would probably not apply for that device
The law of conservation applies to the universe, not the measurement device.
A little bit of googling reveals that I am not the only person to have this question.
To summarize some answers:
a) Energy is conserved by anyone performing an actual observation, therefore energy is conserved. (I suppose this is the 'shut up and calculate' answer.)
b) MWI worlds are actually entirely separate non-interacting universes that just happen to have the exact same history up to the moment of 'divergence.' Therefore energy is conserved.
(But why does world B exist in the first place, waiting around for this specific point of divergence? Are there just so many universes lying around that we're guaranteed to be able to find two that reflect both sides of a given coin flip? Or are the many-worlds realizable as the 'closure' of events from any given world-line?)
But I suppose all of this points at MWI being internally consistent but deeply unsatisfying. Any attempt to chase implications puts you in 'we can't answer why' territory.
I’m very much a layperson in this context but those seem like nonsense answers.
a) If we’re proposing that we need an observer then this is certainly no simpler than the Copenhagen interpretation.
b) I fail to see how this works. There happen to be an infinitude of parallel worlds that only shows up to make individual calculations convenient. It doesn’t seem consistent that those universes would exist to make calculations convenient until the movement of “divergence” and then suddenly they no longer affect later calculations.
For (b), imagine a set S of all possible universes. Then the two universes that agree perfectly up to the chosen event and then diverge are certainly both in S. And since they are non-interacting, there's no problem with energy conservation.
FWIW, the existence of infinite universes to justify calculations also strikes me as deeply unsatisfying...
I don’t have any trouble with the two universes, conceptually. I have trouble with the infinite others. I don’t understand the idea that the two convenient universes are represented by the wave function, but the infinite inconvenient ones are not.
But maybe the answer is that all universes are somehow represented by the wave function and I just don’t understand the implications. This might indeed be the case.
I tend to agree that this is deeply unsatisfying, regardless. Many worlds is interesting but also feels extremely far fetched. It honestly feels a little bit like “we don’t understand this yet, must be magic”.
We’ve invoked an extremely complicated phenomenon to answer a gap in our understanding. And maybe it’s true, but that’s what ancient astronomers thought about the wild paths planets took, too. “The math works out with circles in circles. Occam’s razor, amiright Ptolemy?”
Just an observation here. Our experience is within spacetime, but some discussions indicate there are processes outside of spacetime. Some say dark energy, for example, is the expansion of spacetime and not the motions of objects inside it. Maybe MW is not operating inside either, while conservation and locality are.
> It seems like retaining the information about all possible universes is kind of nonsensical; the volume of data is just too large.
Do you have to retain all the information? Perhaps a set of quantum events is more like a parameter into a function, and the return value is the universe state corresponding to that history. Yeah there's magical black box handwaving going on there but the point is when we literally have no idea, it's not entirely impossible that the quantum multiverse is sparsely populated and lazy loaded with nothing 'computed' into existence until it has to be.
EDIT: Mind, I'm not saying that it is this way. The validity of my proposal isn't the point. The point is that dismissing Many Worlds on the grounds of "too much information" involves assuming a lot of things we don't actually know.
Then my question is 'what defines "until it has to be"?'.
This could be consciousness - in which case my theory applies again ('which branches do you apply the consciousness to?')
The "split universes" is the new science fiction that took the world by storm. It is an unproven hypothesis that satisfies the psychological needs of people who want to dream of a world that behaves according to their wishes.
Unless you yourself have a good and detailed understanding of quantum mechanics, and have solved the Schrodinger equation for many different systems, I'd recommend not assuming that the physicists who proposed many worlds did so out of some psychological need to have the universe look like a branching tree.
The true situation is that the Schrodinger equation straightforwardly predicts a proliferation of worlds when you start from a low-entropy state. (Worlds in this interpretation are actually continuous blobs of amplitude, not discrete objects, which is why it makes sense that a partial differential equation like the Schrodinger equation can describe them. The prediction is that blobs will tend to spread out, split into smaller blobs, etc.) Early quantum physicists were disturbed by this, and added a collapse postulate claiming that the wave-function will sometimes spontaneously collapse, resulting in a single, linear world history rather than a branching one. To this day, spontaneous collapse has never been observed in an experiment.
My understanding is that the reason why the multiverse hypothesis (Everett interpretation) is popular with physicists is it simplifies the equations without losing predictive power. They actually have to add terms for the Copenhagen interpretation. I admittedly don't know the math well, but I think suggesting that it satisfies psychological needs is not generally accurate -- if anything, I think the average person finds the idea uncomfortable. Rather, it has legitimate explanatory and predictive power.
I hate when Occam's razor is applied to non-scientific domains, but this is clearly a scientific domain, and it applies here - multiverse theory is the simpler of the two explanations.
Occam's razor is not a law. It is just a heuristic to consider scientific hypothesis. If you believe something just because of Occam's razor (without any other evidence) I would say this is not very scientific.
You are making a couple mistakes here. The first is that you are arguing with a straw man. I never said anything about it being a law. I also never said Occam's razor is science itself - I said that it's a tool to be applied in the scientific domain.
The second mistake is that you don't seem to understand Occam's razor - yes, it is a heuristic, to determine which theory to weigh as more likely, due to limited time and scientific resources. Furthermore, the idea behind it is that, all else being equal, including available evidence, you choose the simpler theory.
If you had evidence that differentiated the two, you wouldn't need Occam's razor.
But you have to use it to counteract the intuition that only one universe is simpler. Occam's razor is a formal way to tell you, "hey your intuition is wrong, the other theory is the simpler one!" And for it to be useful to you, you can't just allow yourself to say "oh it is just a heuristic" when you don't like what it says. Instead you have to ask "what would I do if I deep down felt that many-worlds was simpler?" and act in accordance.
Occam’s razor means to give less credence for a given theory to be true the more assumptions the theory requires. One can choose to believe in the theory that requires extra assumptions, but, well, that’s making assumptions.
Most likely true, but that doesn't mean it is useless. Adherents to the split universe religi...er...theory might be more content with their lives, experience less anxiety, etc..
Exactly like in any other religion...
Heh, I made something just like it, https://slitdecision.com/
Disclaimer: I have no background in physics at all. I saw this universe splitter and read "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" (Science-Fiction novella by Ted Chiang - the one mentioned in here), and thought hey that's fun.
Nice one! Back in 2012 I built the (now defunct) Freakonomics Experiments site[^1] that used had the same A vs. B premise using John Walker's HotBits[^2] from Switzerland.
In case of interest, Steven Levitt published their - albeit single-Universal - findings in "Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness"[^3]
[1]: https://www.freakonomicsexperiments.com/home/faqs/
[2]: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/how3.html
[3]: https://academic.oup.com/restud/advance-article/doi/10.1093/...
So this is a $1.99 coin flipper?
Yes.
How about a RealityOS with duplicate copies ready to be split. When a user faces an A/B options, realities 2, 3, and 4 can go ahead and execute A, B, and cancel so that when the user makes their choice the winning reality is put in focus and the diffs copied to the rest. You could even hover over a button and watch where it ends up. Like pre-fetching from browsers.
Or when a debugger hits a break point reality 2 can proceed with the execution until you are done investigating.
It could even act like a RAID backup in case a random bit flip causes one reality to crash.
Alas it would be quite wasteful to spend watts on hypotheticals...
Welcome to cryptocurrency mining!
Sean Carroll's Royal Institution lecture discussing the many worlds interpretation and using a similar app:
https://youtu.be/5hVmeOCJjOU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv5FYrOthvE
Surely this is what happens to ALL internet packets in room 641A
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
downloading any app (much less using it) results in billions of worlds .....
Reminds me of post on taking both sides of the decision using a qubit: https://tobilehman.com/posts/qubits-multiverse/
This only works if the many-worlds-interpretation is true, which has not been confirmed
It's not possible to distinguish between many worlds or any other interpretation, so it will never will be confirmed (nor will the Copenhagen interpretation). The only ones that can be confirmed are the "objective collapse" theories, as they produce very slightly different predictions than normal QM.
> It's not [currently] possible to distinguish between many worlds or any other interpretation so [unless or until that changes] it will never will be confirmed (nor will the Copenhagen interpretation).
Seems like the minimum editorializing to make your statement science and not religion, no?
I would argue that with further knowledge (e.g if we figure out Quantum Gravity), these interpretations will no longer apply at all, as they are equivalent descriptions of an incorrect (or, "effective"/approximate) theory. It's not that we lack the tools to distinguish between Copenhagen and MW, but that they are designed to be not possible to distinguish. Further science will produce theories who have different interpretations (hopefully, just one :)
I think it's fair to say that if we ever put a full human being into superposition with a large enough environment for decoherence to happen within the experiment, many worlds is all but confirmed.
This relates to an interpretation of QM that I have not personally found much reading material on, the idea that wavefunction collapse is actually just entanglement; that is to say that as soon as a system in a superposition interacts with the outside universe, the outside universe becomes entangled with the system, thus putting the entire universe into a superposition where both outcomes are observed.
That's precisely Many Worlds! The process you describe is a pretty close match for what's called decoherence. Perhaps you'll have more luck with those search terms, there are quite a few really good resources out there. Just be careful to steer clear of the partisans. However much I disagree with them, the shut-up-and-calculate people give the best overall picture, even when describing a particular interpretation.
Is it? For one reason or another I thought there was a distinction, although reading back what I wrote a second time I can't figure out what it would be.
It's interesting to consider the implications of this line of thinking though; it seems like it would imply that causally-disconnected regions of spacetime (i.e. things outside of our light cone) are forever in a superposition of all possible quantum states, from our perspective, among other things.
I listened to a talk by David Deutsch and he talks about creating an quantum computer based AI and then asking the AI if there are other worlds - (hope I'm not remembering this wrong)
And if we’re in one of the universes where it is true.
This is a common misconception, so if you're just joking I'll prepare myself to be wooshed in the hopes it helps someone else reading this. There is a concept of many universes which permits slightly differing laws of physics (actually different fundamental constants), but many worlds isn't that one. Many Worlds just says that quantum wavefunctions don't collapse. It doesn't posit any "universe" that the Copenhagen interpretation doesn't allow, it just lets them exist side by side.
It was a joke but your comment was interesting nonetheless.
You sound like you'd be interested in Max Tegmark's "Our Mathematical Universe". There are probably multiple levels of multiverses, and in our local "stack" we have 4, where the Many Worlds mechanism is sitting on level 3. Some don't have this level 3, but may have fewer or more levels, using mechanisms foreign to this multiverse, depending on their laws of physics.
Where's the Universe where there's an Android version of this app?
You can use the unofficial Android app (https://github.com/tomicooler/UniverseSplitterUnofficial) or website another commenter made (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30500119)
I'm in it. Are you? Is it Berenstein or Berenstain?
If the single photon simultaneously bounces off the partially-silvered mirror and goes through it, you're not going to get an answer to a binary question from this experimental set-up.
According to the MWI (which is not "prevailing quantum theory") all outcomes of QM experiments are realized, but the experimental apparatus and the rest of the macro world around it become entangled with a particular outcome, and thus unable to perceive the other outcomes.
So after every quantum experiment you get N copies of the world, one in which outcome A has happened, one in which B has happened, one in which outcome C has happened etc, and each of these evolves divergently from there on. Of course, there are trillions of trillions of trillions of "quantum experiments" happening in our immediate surrounding every second, so any one experiment in particular is not that important, but it helps to isolate.
So, instead of taking a decision, you use the app to rest easy that somewhere out there in the universal wave function, there is a copy of you that has taken the opposite decision.
This sounds like one of those ideas that's mathematically very pure but sort of nonsensical otherwise. Basically there are an ~infinite number of universes being created every 1 'units of time' where that unit is ~0.
IDK, I guess the whole speed of light thing is really silly too in a way, but that's provably true.
This just feels really nuts. I guess it's like... where do all of these universes live? I get that our universe expands into whatever, but that seems trivial compared to a theory where every single quantum action leads to a new universe.
Sean Carrol addressed this in his royal institution lecture (a brief history of quantum mechanics, 37m30s). As far as I understood those universes aren't created, you're just selecting a slice of phase space of the (very big) number of possible universes. ( link: https://youtu.be/5hVmeOCJjOU?t=2247 )
> where do all of these universes live?
If you think Max Tegmark is right, then the universe is just mathematics and space itself is a mathematical structure. Is there a limit on how many mathematical structures can exist?
Well that's my exact point. If everything boils down to math, it's all well and good. But I don't think that's the case.
It doesn’t matter since neither event is connected to the outcome of the test anyway. The user could have chosen the opposite fields for the answers (different universe), or another infinite number of split events prior to using the app, one of which is certainly that the app is a joke.
> Within seconds, Universe Splitter© will receive the experiment's result and tell you which of the two universes you're in, and therefore which action to take
if this thing is making my choices for me, then why not skip "the middle man" i.e. me?
I sense a rising humanity motion (like rationalism, or the englightnement or whaterver) towards letting the algorithms make all of our choices. The new absolute monarch is the Algorithm. The Kings are dead, long live the algorithms!?
disclaimer: as tha website is not serious but it does pretend to be, my own comment is also not entirely serious. Often difficult topics are better expressed through fiction (or partial fiction; fiction right now but maybe not later)
or just use /s on things that are going to make a lot of people scratch their head and say "wtf?"
I've just bought this because I've never seen it before and it made both me and the wife laugh out loud.
As a pathologic over-thinker, I need a Universe merger app, any suggestions? :)
As much as I've read about the universe splitting theory never hear heard of a many worlds "merge"
this could be a writing prompt template. finding a way to hold two seemingly contradictory beliefs simultaneously is a solid exercise in creative thinking.
This is baloney. The photon’s choice and your choice make 4 “universes.”
The idea is you make the choice decided by the photon. If you don't use the device according to the instructions, any resulting timeline disruption is on you.
This looks like a "quantum" coin-tossing machine.
I fail to see the point, even if it is connected to some quantum device; it won't make any difference to me, whether my decision is made on a coin-toss or a wave-function collapse.
I can't imagine anyone using this app more than once.
Fun idea, but "according to scientists" and "according to prevailing quantum theory" are questionable. The many worlds interpretation isn't as mainstream as this implies (and many non-physicists think).
Personally I don't think it makes any sense at all, although I have a mere batchelor's degree in physics so I'm not particularly well qualified to judge. I've never had a satisfactory answer to the simple emperor's new clothes question, which requires no knowledge of QM to ask, "If every outcome happens, in what sense is one outcome more probable than another?"
Because it is (experimentally, based on repeat trials), and QM furnishes us with the probabilities.
This is sometimes stated as "How do you get the Born rule?" but it's a simple and obvious question as soon as any sort of multiverse is proposed. I'm aware of the attempts to answer the question using decision theory but while they produce the right numbers they fail to provide a convincing justification for or interpretation of them (vs the simple, experimentally falsifiable frequentist view "if you repeat the experiment you'll see the frequencies approach these probabilities").
One outcome being more probable than another in MW can be interpreted as that outcome being more likely to have occurred in your past. That is also what the frequentist example is measuring, not which outcome is more likely but which outcome is more likely to be in your history.
There is also Quantum Bayseianism in which an outcome being more likely is due to that state being better at copying itself to neighboring states.
In all interpretations (including Copenhagen) the mapping from the unobservable wavefunction is taken as axiom (well, one could argue that Relational QM/Transactional interpretation avoids this, but just adds another axiom).
But how do I use this when I bet at the track? Can I tell them my horse did win, but just in a different universe?
> Fun idea, but "according to scientists" and "according to prevailing quantum theory" are questionable.
Well it is certainly up there in terms of quantum theory along with the Copenhagen interpretation, and some quantum physicists definitely believe this, so considering it is a joke app and mostly a thought experiment I think we can say these statements are accurate enough.
> I've never had a satisfactory answer to the simple emperor's new clothes question, which requires no knowledge of QM to ask, "If every outcome happens, in what sense is one outcome more probable than another?"
I've never had a satisfactory answer to how a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time with the competing Copenhagen interpretation - however I will leave this debate to researchers in quantum mechanics who understand the maths of quantum physics better than my knowledge of quantum dead cats.
I mean, fair's fair, many worlds doesn't give you probabilities. On the other hand, I'm not convinced saying "and then collapse happens" is an explanation for the Born rule anyway, seeing as collapse is just something magic that turns amplitudes into probability in the same way (mathematically) decoherence does. Meanwhile, collapse remains totally unmoored from the rest of quantum mechanics. It could definitely be decided either way, whether by a satisfying explanation of collapse or a solid explanation for the Born rule, but as of now I'd say the weight of evidence is behind many worlds.
>I mean, fair's fair, many worlds doesn't give you probabilities. On the other hand, I'm not convinced saying "and then collapse happens" is an explanation for the Born rule anyway, seeing as collapse is just something magic that turns amplitudes into probability in the same way (mathematically) decoherence does.
An alternative explanation with as much physical evidence as the Many Worlds (MW) interpretation (i.e., none) could be that we are, in fact, part of a simulation[0] and the "wave function" properties of quanta aren't "real" (what is "real" in a simulation?), but rather are artifacts of speculative execution[1] on the part of the CPU executing the aforementioned simulation.
The idea there being that all possible branches are followed, but only the [correct|selected|randomly arrived at|etc.] events are incorporated into "reality."
That, of course, raises a number of questions:
1. How is it that we can perceive such speculative branch execution from inside a simulation executing on such a CPU?
2. What mechanism (algorithm? [pseudo]-random number generation? lookup table?) would be used to determine "actual" outcome from executing all possible code branches?
3. Like the "Many Worlds" hypothesis, treating quantum uncertainty as an artifact of "speculative execution" of all possible branches of simulation code isn't testable (at least not as far as I'm aware). As such, how do we use the scientific method to identify the most likely scenario?
I'm not advocating the position that we do, in fact, live in a simulation. Nor am I advocating the MW, Copenhagen or even Pilot-wave interpretations.
Rather, my point is that none of these interpretations are "science" in the sense of having falsifiable hypotheses. Unless and until we have the appropriate concepts/technology to test such hypotheses, all are just speculation/metaphysics.
That said, I also think it's useful to examine and (where possible) investigate such hypotheses, as that might give us a better understanding of the universe(s) we occupy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_execution
Edit: Clarified prose.
I respect the basic idea of falsification, but the fact is we routinely draw conclusions despite their being just one of infinite possibilities, all of which are unfalsifiable. The tool we use to distinguish between them is Occam's razor, and with it we can argue for one conclusion or another.
Quantum physicists don't agree on MW, Copenhagen, or weirder hidden-variable type theories. But very few of them are of the opinion that, say, the universe has obeyed the laws of physics until now by chance. It has exactly as much evidence as every other theory, but isn't favored by Occam's razor.
Someone favoring the Copenhagen interpretation would argue that the rest of the waveform is deadweight. Someone favoring MW would say collapse is. I don't know many hidden variable people, but maybe they think probabilities are just more elegant.
Not only are universes operating on each of these theories distinct, there are absolutely things we could discover that would push the balance! Bell's Theorem genuinely hurts the credibility of hidden variable theories. MW would be absolutely deranged without the notion of decoherence. If someone published a paper tomorrow showing why world measure translates into probabilities, I'd call that a big win for MW. If someone found a clever, non-decoherence reason for collapse, it would be a big win for the Copenhagen interpretation.
Regardless, such speculation is far from metaphysics. Overly theoretical? Perhaps. But Newton wasn't doing metaphysics when he proposed gravity, and he was shown to be basically right the instant a handful of elegant equations predicted the motion of the planets.
In my experience at least many worlds seems to be popular amongst physicists who avoid the "shut up and calculate" philosophy.
It's like the old joke about Vegans. "How do you know if a physicist is an MWI proponent? Don't worry, they'll tell you soon enough..."