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smk comments on How Many Worlds? - Less Wrong
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You don't agree that Decoherence is Simple? (Not that I'm qualified to have any opinion on the matter.)
I'm glad you gave me that link, thanks. I had seen that article a while ago and it was good to refresh.
The problem with the Many Worlds Hypothesis is that it solves no problem, in my opinion.
In simplest terms, the problem with the "standard" interpretation is that you have probabilistic outcomes from some experiments. Some people hate that.
The "solution" offered by MWI is that at every instance where a wave function would have collapsed to some probabilistically determined valuewe have the universe split into as mny choices as there are possible wave function collapses, even when that number is infinity because the wave function collapses into a continuum of position or velocity values. And this happens over and over and over so you have an efflorescense of zillions and 3^^^^^^3 and googleplexes of universes.
What problem did this solve? Oh yeah, the arbitrariness of the probabilistic result predicted in quantum mechanics.
What problem did it not solve? That I wound up in this particular universe, no physics to explain that. "Oh, but you wound up in ALL the universes!" I got cloned a zillionplex times with the universe. So did everybody else. In fact you got cloned a zillionplex times when a wave function collapsed because I observed something, and then your zillionplex clones got cloned another zillionplex times when you observed something, and then a zillionplex more splittings of each of you for each wavefunction collapse for each of the billions of humans on the planet. Do ants have enough "observer status" to collapse wave functions? Probably, if not ants than certainly frogs.
So we wind up with a near meaningless explosion of universes that is constantly going on, and indeed is in important senses accelerating constantly.
And of course every one of these overwhelmingly zillionplexes of zillionplexes of universes is unobservable to us, will never have the slightest affect on us, once they split off from us!
Its almost as though they don't exist!
Except things like quantum computers. It's almost like those worlds do exist and that we can even use their transistors to parallel process stuff.
Well that is definitely a fun thing to say. It doesn't seem to be consistent with what is currently thought about quantum computers and Many Worlds, though.
Your link to the wikipedia article on the MWI does not clarify your objection to the statement made above.
The wikipedia article states
If a quantum computer could correctly be characterized as a computer which utilized the transistors in other branches of the multiverse to speed up calculations in this one, then it would merely require the operation of any quantum computer at all to provide strong evidence for the multiverse. However, the article states that a test for MWI requires a particular special operation of a particular special quantum computer, that the multiverse is not a conclusion we reach merely by seeing a quantum computer work.
Sorry I didn't make that connection clearer before.
I'm pretty confident that that paper is in error. Or rather, it assumes that the Copenhagen Interpretation is implemented so that it deviates from pure Quantum Mechanics in a particular, testable, way (or category of ways) - and that renders his version of CI distinguishable from MWI, and less useful for quantum computing. When I get academic library access again, I'll take a closer look at it.
Upon returning and rereading... no. Branches in MWI aren't said to have 'split off' until they are mutually decoherent. That renders them unsuitable for quantum computing.