Subscribe to RSS feedFor the bus ride home, I'm going to check out "One world versus many: the inadequacy of Everettian accounts of evolution, probability, and scientific confirmation" by Adrian Kent (arXiv/0905.0624) Nothing like ending the day with some against many-worlds reading. That and a fun TED talk should make the ride go by fast
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Dave Bacon is a theoretical ski bum who is also a pseudo professor. His research is on quantum computing, his scientific passions extend to everything in physics, mathematics, computer science and beyond, and his personal pleasures include making wine, playing poker, skiing, camping, and daydreaming (although not all of those at the same time.)
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Many-Worlds Critique
Category: Self: Meet Center. Center: Meet Self.
Posted on: May 6, 2009 9:12 PM, by Dave Bacon
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I've seen Adrian talk about this stuff and I think it will be a good paper. For the proper context, it needs to be read in conjunction with David Wallace's papers on probability in many-worlds.
Posted by: Matt Leifer | May 7, 2009 6:30 AM
One thing that struck me about most every approach to no-collapse interpretations, including this one, is that they treat the quasi-classical worlds as non-interacting. Clearly, unitarity requires that this is just a convenient approximation.
Robin Hanson actually tries to get somewhere with using these interactions to get Born law-like behavior. Successfully? Well, I need to see the code he uses for his simulations, but it at least sounds promising. The basic idea is that the disturbance of one quasi-classical world upon another nearby is weighted _naturally_, _in the dynamics_ by the Born weights. Small worlds then get "destroyed" (nonsensical evolution, hence no observers that are human-like) by nearby larger worlds. But only "typical" worlds (i.e. ones having measurement records one would expect from Copenhagen) end up having non-negligible Born weights.
Posted by: Aaron | May 11, 2009 9:34 PM