Baughn comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Unnamed 27 May 2010 12:10AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (866)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Baughn 04 July 2010 01:09:37AM *  2 points [-]

I interpreted it as stating that they had actually performed the experiment, and gotten a positive result. Am I misinterpreting something?

Comment author: Sniffnoy 04 July 2010 04:11:19AM 1 point [-]

As I understand it, their theory is that time travel is like postselection. Hence, to determine what would happen in the case of the grandfather paradox, they set up an equivalent postselection experiment. So if their theory is correct, the results of an actual grandfather paradox experiment would match the results of this simulated-via-postselection one.

Comment author: Baughn 04 July 2010 07:25:12AM 0 points [-]

In what sense is post-selection not time-travel? You've still got the state at time T determined by the state at T+1.

Comment author: Sniffnoy 04 July 2010 08:18:11AM 1 point [-]

Because, if I'm reading this right, they literally manually postselected the results. They didn't come up with some way to get the physics to postselect it for you.

Comment author: wedrifid 04 July 2010 03:23:07AM 0 points [-]

we report the results of an experiment demonstrating our theory's resolution of the well-known `grandfather paradox.

My interpretation matches yours.