Well done Brian (Cox): You are helping to put people off the scent. You really don't want to follow this one!
This news item on UD by Denise O’Leary is worth mentioning: She quotes a BBC web site article where Brian Cox was quoted:
“That there’s an infinite number of universes sounds
more complicated than there being one,” Prof Cox told the programme.
“But actually, it’s a simpler version of quantum
mechanics. It’s quantum mechanics without wave function collapse… the idea that
by observing something you force a system to make a choice.”*1
Accepting the many worlds interpretation of quantum
mechanics means also having to accept that things can exist in several states at
the same time.
But this leads to a another question: Why do we
perceive only one world, not many?
I think I probably would go
along with the sentiment of Denise’s comments here: If we are allowed to play
the game in terms of what theoretical concepts make sense*2, then I have to say that
for me the “many worlds” interpretation
of quantum theory makes very little sense indeed, and that’s because for me the cosmos is starting to look
like a declarative programmer's paradise (See
also: http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/melencolia-i-part-3-sharpening-focus.html
)
The question about
why we don’t see those many worlds is very telling: In the many worlds view ancillary devices have to
be added to explain why the macro world doesn't manifest quantum ambiguities;
after all, chaos will insure that these ambiguities get magnified up to macro
level. Moreover, decoherence ideas don’t fit very well with those quantum experiments
where there is a null result but where the implication is that the quantum state
vector still jumps in a discontinuous way and in a way that implies non-locality.
The article
linked to by Denise finishes with this statement:
Brian Cox
supports the many worlds interpretation and, he believes, more and more
physicists are now subscribing to this view.
Suits me! That
should keep them off the scent and off my heels for a bit! I need some of
space. In any case I’m a crank – who’d want to follow a crank, eh? So please
don’t follow me, I've probably picked up the scent of a skunk.
Footnotes:
*1 Cox's sentiment of "simplification" of choice, if taken to its uttermost, leads to Max Tegmark's Mathematical Universe where every mathematically coherent alternative has been selected for reification, thus doing away with any hint that there is some enigmatic agency out there actually making a very particular and special selection from platonic space.... although there is one choice left; namely, the choice between everything and nothing; Max doesn't tell us why everything rather than nothing has been choosen! See here: http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/contingency-and-grand-logical-hiatus.html
*2 In the final
analysis “making sense of evidence” is all theoretical narratives can do – this is because evidence is never inductive, but rather abductive
.
*1 Cox's sentiment of "simplification" of choice, if taken to its uttermost, leads to Max Tegmark's Mathematical Universe where every mathematically coherent alternative has been selected for reification, thus doing away with any hint that there is some enigmatic agency out there actually making a very particular and special selection from platonic space.... although there is one choice left; namely, the choice between everything and nothing; Max doesn't tell us why everything rather than nothing has been choosen! See here: http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/contingency-and-grand-logical-hiatus.html
Once upon a time in the Web
A story from of Wild Web
Smells like a skunk: Quantum Theory looks a bit mad.
Brian Cox isn't Clint Eastwood so there's no competition in town.
Closing in on our wanted man.
But we haven't nailed him yet!
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