You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Ander comments on Open thread, Mar. 9 - Mar. 15, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: MrMind 09 March 2015 07:48AM

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

Comments (109)

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

Comment author: Ander 09 March 2015 10:06:32PM *  2 points [-]

For example: last night, I briefly considered the 'Multiple Interacting Worlds' interpretation of quantum physics, in which it is postulated that there are a large number of universes, each of which has pure Newtonian physics internally, but whose interactions with near-identical universes cause what we observe as quantum phenomena. It's very similar to the 'Multiple Worlds' interpretation, except instead of new universes branching from old ones at every moment in an ever-spreading bush, all the branches branched out at the Big Bang.

The "Many worlds" interpretation does not postulate a large number of universes. It only postulates:

1) The world is described by a quantum state, which is an element of a kind of vector space known as Hilbert space. 2) The quantum state evolves through time in accordance with the Schrödinger equation, with some particular Hamiltonian.

That's it. Take the old Copenhagen interpretation and remove all ideas about 'collapsing the wave function'.

The 'many worlds' appear when you do the math, they are derived from these postulates.

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2015/02/19/the-wrong-objections-to-the-many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics/

Regarding the difference between 'the worlds all appear at the big bang' versus 'the worlds are always appearing', what would the difference between these be in terms of the actual mathematical equations?

The 'new worlds appearing all the time' in MWH is a consequence of the quantum state evolving through time in accordance with the Schrödinger equation.

All of that said, I don't mean to criticize your post or anything, I thought it was great technobabble! I just have no idea how it would translate into actual theories. :)

Comment author: DataPacRat 10 March 2015 12:50:58AM 1 point [-]

'Many Interacting Worlds' seems to be a slightly separate interpretation from 'Many Worlds' - what's true for MW isn't necessarily so for MIW. (There've been some blog posts in recent months on the topic which brought it to my attention.)