[HN Gopher] Universe Splitter
___________________________________________________________________
Universe Splitter
Author : hexomancer
Score : 186 points
Date : 2022-02-28 12:38 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cheapuniverses.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cheapuniverses.com)
| realYitzi wrote:
| Just my luck to be in the universe where I have an Android and
| the app is only for iPhone :(
| gorkish wrote:
| It's not really a problem. I went ahead and split the universe
| for you. Between options A and B, you are to select option B.
| [deleted]
| josu wrote:
| You are in the correct universe:
| https://github.com/tomicooler/UniverseSplitterUnofficial
| pkage wrote:
| There is an official Android app[0], it's linked on the
| developer's main page[1]--but weirdly enough not on the
| homepage.
|
| [0]
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Aerfish.Un...
| [1] https://www.aerfish.com/
| ossyrial wrote:
| Heh, I made something just like it, https://slitdecision.com/
|
| Disclaimer: I have no background in physics at all. I saw this
| universe splitter and read "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom"
| (Science-Fiction novella by Ted Chiang - the one mentioned in
| here), and thought hey that's fun.
| interleave wrote:
| Nice one! Back in 2012 I built the (now defunct) Freakonomics
| Experiments site[^1] that used had the same A vs. B premise
| using John Walker's HotBits[^2] from Switzerland.
|
| In case of interest, Steven Levitt published their - albeit
| single-Universal - findings in "Heads or Tails: The Impact of a
| Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness"[^3]
|
| [1]: https://www.freakonomicsexperiments.com/home/faqs/
|
| [2]: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/how3.html
|
| [3]: https://academic.oup.com/restud/advance-
| article/doi/10.1093/...
| omnicognate wrote:
| Fun idea, but "according to scientists" and "according to
| prevailing quantum theory" are questionable. The many worlds
| interpretation isn't as mainstream as this implies (and many non-
| physicists think).
|
| Personally I don't think it makes any sense at all, although I
| have a mere batchelor's degree in physics so I'm not particularly
| well qualified to judge. I've never had a satisfactory answer to
| the simple emperor's new clothes question, which requires no
| knowledge of QM to ask, "If every outcome happens, in what sense
| is one outcome more probable than another?"
|
| Because it is (experimentally, based on repeat trials), and QM
| furnishes us with the probabilities.
|
| This is sometimes stated as "How do you get the Born rule?" but
| it's a simple and obvious question as soon as any sort of
| multiverse is proposed. I'm aware of the attempts to answer the
| question using decision theory but while they produce the right
| numbers they fail to provide a convincing justification for or
| interpretation of them (vs the simple, experimentally falsifiable
| frequentist view "if you repeat the experiment you'll see the
| frequencies approach these probabilities").
| ravi-delia wrote:
| I mean, fair's fair, many worlds doesn't give you
| probabilities. On the other hand, I'm not convinced saying "and
| then collapse happens" is an explanation for the Born rule
| anyway, seeing as collapse is just something magic that turns
| amplitudes into probability in the same way (mathematically)
| decoherence does. Meanwhile, collapse remains totally unmoored
| from the rest of quantum mechanics. It could definitely be
| decided either way, whether by a satisfying explanation of
| collapse or a solid explanation for the Born rule, but as of
| now I'd say the weight of evidence is behind many worlds.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >I mean, fair's fair, many worlds doesn't give you
| probabilities. On the other hand, I'm not convinced saying
| "and then collapse happens" is an explanation for the Born
| rule anyway, seeing as collapse is just something magic that
| turns amplitudes into probability in the same way
| (mathematically) decoherence does.
|
| An alternative explanation with as much _physical evidence_
| as the Many Worlds (MW) interpretation (i.e., _none_ )
| _could_ be that we are, in fact, part of a simulation[0] and
| the "wave function" properties of quanta aren't "real" (what
| is "real" in a simulation?), but rather are artifacts of
| speculative execution[1] on the part of the CPU executing the
| aforementioned simulation.
|
| The idea there being that all possible branches are followed,
| but only the [correct|selected|randomly arrived at|etc.]
| events are incorporated into "reality."
|
| That, of course, raises a number of questions:
|
| 1. How is it that we can perceive such speculative branch
| execution from _inside_ a simulation executing on such a CPU?
|
| 2. What mechanism (algorithm? [pseudo]-random number
| generation? lookup table?) would be used to determine
| "actual" outcome from executing all possible code branches?
|
| 3. Like the "Many Worlds" hypothesis, treating quantum
| uncertainty as an artifact of "speculative execution" of all
| possible branches of simulation code isn't testable (at least
| not as far as I'm aware). As such, how do we use the
| scientific method to identify the most likely scenario?
|
| I'm not advocating the position that we do, in fact, live in
| a simulation. Nor am I advocating the MW, Copenhagen or even
| Pilot-wave interpretations.
|
| Rather, my point is that none of these interpretations are
| "science" in the sense of having falsifiable hypotheses.
| Unless and until we have the appropriate concepts/technology
| to _test_ such hypotheses, all are just speculation
| /metaphysics.
|
| That said, I also think it's useful to examine and (where
| possible) investigate such hypotheses, as that _might_ give
| us a better understanding of the universe(s) we occupy.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_execution
|
| Edit: Clarified prose.
| mhh__ wrote:
| In my experience at least many worlds seems to be popular
| amongst physicists who avoid the "shut up and calculate"
| philosophy.
| Closi wrote:
| > Fun idea, but "according to scientists" and "according to
| prevailing quantum theory" are questionable.
|
| Well it is certainly up there in terms of quantum theory along
| with the Copenhagen interpretation, and some quantum physicists
| definitely believe this, so considering it is a _joke app_ and
| mostly a thought experiment I think we can say these statements
| are accurate enough.
|
| > I've never had a satisfactory answer to the simple emperor's
| new clothes question, which requires no knowledge of QM to ask,
| "If every outcome happens, in what sense is one outcome more
| probable than another?"
|
| I've never had a satisfactory answer to how a cat can be both
| alive and dead at the same time with the competing Copenhagen
| interpretation - however I will leave this debate to
| researchers in quantum mechanics who understand the maths of
| quantum physics better than my knowledge of quantum dead cats.
| beecafe wrote:
| One outcome being more probable than another in MW can be
| interpreted as that outcome being more likely to have occurred
| in your past. That is also what the frequentist example is
| measuring, not which outcome is more likely but which outcome
| is more likely to be in your history.
|
| There is also Quantum Bayseianism in which an outcome being
| more likely is due to that state being better at copying itself
| to neighboring states.
|
| In all interpretations (including Copenhagen) the mapping from
| the unobservable wavefunction is taken as axiom (well, one
| could argue that Relational QM/Transactional interpretation
| avoids this, but just adds another axiom).
| dumbfounder wrote:
| But how do I use this when I bet at the track? Can I tell
| them my horse did win, but just in a different universe?
| songeater wrote:
| Also see:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit...
| yoaviram wrote:
| I once wrote up about this thought experiment and some of its
| variants. I particularly recommend the discussion it generated
| on Reddit for may interesting viewpoints (link towards the end
| of the post).
|
| https://www.thoughtexperiments.net/quantum-suicide/
| Sander_Marechal wrote:
| I've read a terrifying short story about that once. It was
| about a man that never died. The universe just grew ever more
| unlikely and absurd around him due to quantum immortality.
|
| Edit: Found it. "Divided by infinity":
| https://www.tor.com/2010/08/05/divided-by-infinity/
| medstrom wrote:
| To the people that say the idea is false, indeed that it is
| fictional: why do you think so? Genuine question.
| k__ wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| The idea if quantum immortality was one of the first things I
| thought when I read about multiple universes.
|
| I never did research on it an it was just a week ago that I
| heard this was "a thing" but it wasn't a sound theory, for
| all the reasons that wiki article mentions.
|
| I guess, I wanted to live with the thought that it was
| possible, that's why I never researched about it.
|
| Thanks for the link, I imagined that my life would become
| like in the story too, lol.
| shagie wrote:
| There's also _All the Myriad Ways_ by Larry Niven - https://a
| rchive.org/details/Galaxy_v27n03_1968-10/page/n31/m...
| saalweachter wrote:
| In "Ilium/Olympos" by Dan Simmons, the post-human society is
| riddled with quantum magic. Achilles has had his future
| narrowed down to two possibilities: dying at a specific time
| after being shot in the heel by an arrow shot by Paris, or
| dying of old age in bed.
| maze-le wrote:
| Wow, that was quite a ride, thanks for sharing!
| Taniwha wrote:
| Surely this is what happens to ALL internet packets in room 641A
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
|
| downloading any app (much less using it) results in billions of
| worlds .....
| verytrivial wrote:
| This is my main data backup app. I sleep soundly knowing that
| after a total HDD crash my data is still safe and sound on a
| different timeline.
| RistrettoMike wrote:
| This website, the app's visual design, and that old plastic-
| chromed iPhone all harken back to a simpler time when there were
| funny one-off apps just for the hell of it.
|
| The time of $1.99 quantum splitters, $0.99 iBeer, and $1.99
| Lightsaber apps is long gone. Most of those apps didn't really
| _do_ anything all that amazing, but looking back on it I think I
| miss when app stores were flush with "we could use the hardware
| to do _this_ " rather than "we could get in-app purchases and
| subscriptions like _this_ "
|
| Not that there wasn't monetization as a goal back then, but just
| that there was a lot of weird paradigms being experimented on
| where we now have a solidly 10-year norm instead.
| brudgers wrote:
| That there-was-a-time was the-brief-moment-when the iPhone app
| store was a folk art medium.
|
| Popular folk art is dangerous.
|
| So a bureaucracy was built.
| ggasp wrote:
| I bought this App when was mentioned by Sean Carroll in one of
| his talks/podcast about quantum computing. And because of that,
| I really thought that they did something that was founded in
| quantum physics. Not that it was really important, but it was
| cool to say "see, now it's contacting LHC to shot another
| photon The only think that I'm sorry about is that with every
| change of iPhone I've lost the track of what Universe I am!
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Clearly, you are in the universe where a new iPhone was
| released.
| tazjin wrote:
| It seems like retaining the information about all possible
| universes is kind of nonsensical; the volume of data is just too
| large.
|
| If we assume that the universe is deterministic inside of itself
| except for quantum decisions, it seems reasonable to me that a
| structure on the outside of this universe would perform something
| like a Monte Carlo tree search (assuming that there is a "success
| condition" for a universe), and branches are only explored to
| some depth before being discarded. You could then - if you really
| had to - backtrack to an earlier known state and start exploring
| again.
|
| In my general view, it's also likely that consciousness is only
| projected into branches once it's sufficiently established that
| they're reasonable to follow (I think consciousness might be
| expensive).
|
| Some random ranting ...
| tasha0663 wrote:
| > It seems like retaining the information about all possible
| universes is kind of nonsensical; the volume of data is just
| too large.
|
| Do you have to retain all the information? Perhaps a set of
| quantum events is more like a parameter into a function, and
| the return value is the universe state corresponding to that
| history. Yeah there's magical black box handwaving going on
| there but the point is when we literally have no idea, it's not
| entirely impossible that the quantum multiverse is sparsely
| populated and lazy loaded with nothing 'computed' into
| existence until it has to be.
|
| EDIT: Mind, I'm not saying that it _is_ this way. The validity
| of my proposal isn 't the point. The point is that dismissing
| Many Worlds on the grounds of "too much information" involves
| assuming a lot of things we don't actually know.
| tazjin wrote:
| Then my question is 'what defines "until it has to be"?'.
|
| This could be consciousness - in which case my theory applies
| again ('which branches do you apply the consciousness _to_?
| ')
| imglorp wrote:
| Human intuition has been completely inconsistent with observed
| reality since relativity and QM were conceived. We should use
| other means to evaluate the Many Worlds idea.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Two questions I've long had about many worlds:
|
| 1) Where is all of the mass/energy coming from? Why is it ok
| to throw all conservation laws out the window and double the
| universe whenever two quanta get too close to one another?
|
| 2) What's up with locality? Does the spilt somehow radiate
| outwards from the splitting event at the speed of light? Or
| do we end up with an instantaneous non-local forking of the
| universe?
| imglorp wrote:
| Just an observation here. Our experience is within
| spacetime, but some discussions indicate there are
| processes outside of spacetime. Some say dark energy, for
| example, is the expansion of spacetime and not the motions
| of objects inside it. Maybe MW is not operating inside
| either, while conservation and locality are.
| IMTDb wrote:
| Regarding 1), you just need to think about conservation
| laws as being many worlds "blind".
|
| Let's assume that we devise an experiment that we 100%
| prove would split the universe in 3 versions. Executing
| that experiments splits world 1 into world 1a, 1b, and 1c.
| Conservations laws will state that the total energy in
| world 1a == total energy in world 1b == total energy in
| world 1c == total energy in world 1.
|
| Assume that you have a measurement device that is not "many
| world" aware, you can only measure the total energy in
| world 1 - before the experiment takes place - and -
| depending on which many world "version" you measure
| afterwards - the total energy in world 1a OR world 1b OR
| world 1c. According to the measurement device, conservation
| laws will be respected. Even tho the world was split.
|
| Currently, all our measurement devices are not many world
| aware, and are only able to measure physical properties in
| one world version. This makes it extremely hard -
| impossible in fact - to fully prove that other universe
| exist in parallel. If we were able to build a measurement
| device that is able to have some kind of "total value
| across world 1a, 1b and 1c", that would be a game changer,
| and conservations laws would probably not apply for that
| device. So far we haven't been able to build one, so
| conservations laws are considered universal.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| A little bit of googling reveals that I am not the only
| person to have this question.
|
| To summarize some answers:
|
| a) Energy is conserved by anyone performing an actual
| observation, therefore energy is conserved. (I suppose this
| is the 'shut up and calculate' answer.)
|
| b) MWI worlds are actually entirely separate non-
| interacting universes that just happen to have the exact
| same history up to the moment of 'divergence.' Therefore
| energy is conserved.
|
| (But why does world B exist in the first place, waiting
| around for this specific point of divergence? Are there
| just so many universes lying around that we're guaranteed
| to be able to find two that reflect both sides of a given
| coin flip? Or are the many-worlds realizable as the
| 'closure' of events from any given world-line?)
|
| But I suppose all of this points at MWI being internally
| consistent but deeply unsatisfying. Any attempt to chase
| implications puts you in 'we can't answer why' territory.
| plutonorm wrote:
| I think it's much cleaner to assume all possible realities
| exist - otherwise you have to account for the fact that some do
| not exist.
|
| Why would there be some possible realities and not others? Much
| cleaner to assume that all possible realities exist. Then when
| you ask, why is there not just nothing? You can answer, why
| would there be nothing rather than something? Is that not a
| special case? It is a special case and requires a cause to make
| it nothing rather than something. And so we arrive at the
| concept of the void. That which is not nothing but rather all
| potentialities simultaneously. True nothing and everything are
| very similar. What is the state of maximum disorder? A signal
| that is completely random. It's algorithmic complexity must be
| maximal. The program to describe it must be maximal and so
| within it, it contains all possible machines. All possible
| constructions, all universes. Nothing is everything and so it
| is not possible to have nothing, and so the universe exists.
| QED Where's my Nobel?
| medstrom wrote:
| It's like someone said: Occam's Razor only likes two numbers:
| zero and infinity. Any other number on anything needs
| evidence for why it's this number.
| aj7 wrote:
| "The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to
| make sense."
|
| -- Tom Clancy and Mark Twain
| simplify wrote:
| Why would being "cleaner" make any difference for the
| likelihood of a theory? Isn't "clean" just a made-up concept
| that merely means "pleasant" to the human mind?
|
| I don't see how "all cases" is any more likely than "one
| case".
| babagabooj wrote:
| This was said verbatim in a TED talk titled "Why does the
| universe exist"
| aj7 wrote:
| This is baloney. The photon's choice and your choice make 4
| "universes."
| simonh wrote:
| The idea is you make the choice decided by the photon. If you
| don't use the device according to the instructions, any
| resulting timeline disruption is on you.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| This looks like a "quantum" coin-tossing machine.
|
| I fail to see the point, even if it is connected to some quantum
| device; it won't make any difference to me, whether my decision
| is made on a coin-toss or a wave-function collapse.
|
| I can't imagine anyone using this app more than once.
| jdefelice wrote:
| First time I've came across the Universe Splitter was from This
| American Life with a good layman explanation.
|
| https://www.thisamericanlife.org/691/transcript
| habitmelon wrote:
| Reminds me of post on taking both sides of the decision using a
| qubit: https://tobilehman.com/posts/qubits-multiverse/
| smoyer wrote:
| If the single photon simultaneously bounces off the partially-
| silvered mirror and goes through it, you're not going to get an
| answer to a binary question from this experimental set-up.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| According to the MWI (which is not "prevailing quantum theory")
| all outcomes of QM experiments are realized, but the
| experimental apparatus and the rest of the macro world around
| it become entangled with a particular outcome, and thus unable
| to perceive the other outcomes.
|
| So after every quantum experiment you get N copies of the
| world, one in which outcome A has happened, one in which B has
| happened, one in which outcome C has happened etc, and each of
| these evolves divergently from there on. Of course, there are
| trillions of trillions of trillions of "quantum experiments"
| happening in our immediate surrounding every second, so any one
| experiment in particular is not that important, but it helps to
| isolate.
|
| So, instead of taking a decision, you use the app to rest easy
| that somewhere out there in the universal wave function, there
| is a copy of you that has taken the opposite decision.
| staticassertion wrote:
| This sounds like one of those ideas that's mathematically
| very pure but sort of nonsensical otherwise. Basically there
| are an ~infinite number of universes being created every 1
| 'units of time' where that unit is ~0.
|
| IDK, I guess the whole speed of light thing is really silly
| too in a way, but that's provably true.
|
| This just feels really nuts. I guess it's like... where do
| all of these universes live? I get that our universe expands
| into whatever, but that seems trivial compared to a theory
| where every single quantum action leads to a new universe.
| criddell wrote:
| > where do all of these universes live?
|
| If you think Max Tegmark is right, then the universe is
| just mathematics and space itself is a mathematical
| structure. Is there a limit on how many mathematical
| structures can exist?
| staticassertion wrote:
| Well that's my exact point. If everything boils down to
| math, it's all well and good. But I don't think that's
| the case.
| zogomoox wrote:
| Sean Carrol addressed this in his royal institution lecture
| (a brief history of quantum mechanics, 37m30s). As far as I
| understood those universes aren't created, you're just
| selecting a slice of phase space of the (very big) number
| of possible universes. ( link:
| https://youtu.be/5hVmeOCJjOU?t=2247 )
| jonhohle wrote:
| It doesn't matter since neither event is connected to the
| outcome of the test anyway. The user could have chosen the
| opposite fields for the answers (different universe), or
| another infinite number of split events prior to using the app,
| one of which is certainly that the app is a joke.
| mcguire wrote:
| Sean Carroll's Royal Institution lecture discussing the many
| worlds interpretation and using a similar app:
|
| https://youtu.be/5hVmeOCJjOU
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv5FYrOthvE
| lionheart wrote:
| There's a short story out there about a device that can actually
| do this and then let you stay in contact with your alternate self
| for a while to see how things turn out. Fascinating stuff.
| [deleted]
| h0l0cube wrote:
| There's an underrated TV series about (vaguely) this idea
| called Counterpart:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series)
| euroderf wrote:
| It functioned well as a spy-sci-fi crossover. But in this
| universe it got canceled.
| zogomoox wrote:
| I landed in an absurd universe where it looks like the iron
| curtain will make a comeback soon.
| curvilinear_m wrote:
| "Dear Nia" from exurb1a on YouTube tells a similar story
| jetbooster wrote:
| For the exact opposite of a short story, there is a villain in
| the web-novel Worm whose power works as a variation of this
| effect.
| imron wrote:
| > For the exact opposite of a short story,
|
| Ain't that the truth!
|
| That said, Worm was an amazing story let down a bit by the
| ending.
| asicsp wrote:
| IIRC, _Exhalation: Stories_ by Ted Chiang had one like that.
| ExtraE wrote:
| Yep. Ted Chaing is a great author.
| https://onezero.medium.com/anxiety-is-the-dizziness-of-
| freed...
| ekidd wrote:
| There's another short story out there which assumes that when
| you die in one branched universe, you survive in another. So in
| your _subjective_ experience, you always survive, no matter how
| low the chances. But eventually your survival requires stranger
| and stranger events to occur. After a thousand years, your
| subjective experience becomes utterly implausible, and yet
| there you are. But you may not _like_ the universe in which you
| survive that long. Which is too bad, because you can 't
| subjectively die.
|
| I'll probably remember the title tomorrow, if nobody beats me
| to it. It was a fairly disturbing story.
| jerf wrote:
| It's not a story, but AFAIK I independently observed that
| about the MWI of the universe before:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22055186
|
| I think MWI is appealing to a lot of people as part of the
| quiet, but ever-present undercurrent of "how can we make any
| sort of God totally unnecessary to the universe?" that
| science has, but if you think about it deeply enough, it
| becomes clear that MWI, if true, is unbelievably horrible.
| We'd all better hope it's not the correct interpretation.
|
| Edit: Thanks for the link to the story. I had not read it or
| seen it before. Same principles for sure. I don't think it's
| a crazy extrapolation of MWI, I think it's the only logical
| outcome. I can put that opinion into more firm mathematical
| language but it's more than I can put into an HN comment, and
| I haven't typed it out anywhere else either, and it really is
| just that opinion, in more mathematical language.
| ZephyrP wrote:
| Having a slew of physical theories with profound
| existential ramifications to choose from, why do you think
| the "many-worlds interpretation" is _particularly_
| connected to secularization?
| jerf wrote:
| I portrayed it as part of the general trend, not
| specially connected.
| zackmorris wrote:
| I arrived at this philosophy independently, so I tend to
| subscribe to it. Along the lines of The Secret and
| manifestation, I've noticed that whatever we think about
| tends to happen in reality (as above, so below).
|
| So the main difference between someone like a Buddhist monk
| and a former US president with a taste for gold is one of
| choice. The monk acknowledges that all routes to living one's
| best life are possible so abstains from attaching to outcomes
| too strongly, while the former president asserts his ego to
| maximize a certain dimension like personal wealth at the
| expense of all the others. Too much choice and we risk being
| ungrounded, too little choice and we end up caught in a web
| of our own design.
|
| There's a great scene on the show Vikings where Ragnar says:
|
| _Power is only given to those who are prepared to lower
| themselves to pick it up._
|
| Really everything is possible, and we can use our will to
| sidestep into other realities. But from a framework of
| reincarnation and the multiverse, our choices can impose on
| the freedoms of others, so we should be mindful of the
| impacts of our decisions, because others are aspects of
| ourselves in another life.
|
| I feel rather strongly that most of the world's problems like
| wealth inequality and war stem from overexertion of the ego.
| People constrain themselves into corners and then project
| their anxieties onto others to the point where it seems like
| nobody gets to live their best life.
| MarcoZavala wrote:
| fonix wrote:
| Ah yes!!! "Divided by infinity". I had this saved as I like
| to go back and read it every so often.
|
| https://www.tor.com/2010/08/05/divided-by-infinity/
| ekidd wrote:
| Ah, thank you! That is it. Just as biting and dark as I
| remember it.
|
| Greg Egan also has a number of stories about people who
| rebelled against a "many worlds" universe by porting human
| cognition to run on "Quantum Single Processors," which
| would carefully isolate themselves from the universe until
| they had made a single decision across every possible
| timeline. This didn't prevent them from being "branched" by
| outside factors, but it at least gave them an approximation
| of free will.
| medstrom wrote:
| Greg Egan writes true sci-fi. Exploring what-ifs further
| than anyone has explored them, and putting them up in
| story format so you don't have to be Einstein.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I think there was also a concept for scientifically testing
| the MWI, but that only works subjectively. You essentially
| play Russian roulette, preferably based on the outcomes of a
| quantum measurement. Repeat until you either die or are
| satisfied that the world you are in is so implausible as to
| be impossible unless indeed every outcome is realised.
|
| Say, fire an electron at a double slit with a detector in one
| of the slits, and kill yourself if the particle is not
| detected. Run the experiment 10,000 times, or 100,000,000
| times - one copy of you will eventually be satisfied that in
| any probabilistic interpretation of QM this is not plausible,
| and all the other copies will be dead.
|
| This works because the MWI predicts that any outcome that has
| non-0 probability according to the Born rule will be
| guaranteed to happen (it just "happens less" by some hard to
| define metric).
|
| Personally I believe the entire notion is absurd, and that
| this type of thought experiment makes it clear, but still
| some like to be contrary.
| gilbetron wrote:
| Only issue is that survival only means non-death. Maybe the
| experiment doesn't kill you, but puts you in a coma -
| forever ;)
| tiborsaas wrote:
| As a pathologic over-thinker, I need a Universe merger app, any
| suggestions? :)
| gfody wrote:
| this could be a writing prompt template. finding a way to hold
| two seemingly contradictory beliefs simultaneously is a solid
| exercise in creative thinking.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| As much as I've read about the universe splitting theory never
| hear heard of a many worlds "merge"
| karamanolev wrote:
| On that topic, I can highly recommend a Sci-Fi novella called
| "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" by Ted Chiang (the movie
| Arrival is based on one of his other novels). Concerns a device
| that also splits the universe, but allows a limited amount of
| information transfer between the two splits.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety_Is_the_Dizziness_of_Fr...
| ExtraE wrote:
| Ted Chiang is a great author. Link to the story:
| https://onezero.medium.com/anxiety-is-the-dizziness-of-freed...
| coliveira wrote:
| The "split universes" is the new science fiction that took the
| world by storm. It is an unproven hypothesis that satisfies the
| psychological needs of people who want to dream of a world that
| behaves according to their wishes.
| c1ccccc1 wrote:
| Unless you yourself have a good and detailed understanding of
| quantum mechanics, and have solved the Schrodinger equation for
| many different systems, I'd recommend not assuming that the
| physicists who proposed many worlds did so out of some
| psychological need to have the universe look like a branching
| tree.
|
| The true situation is that the Schrodinger equation
| straightforwardly predicts a proliferation of worlds when you
| start from a low-entropy state. (Worlds in this interpretation
| are actually continuous blobs of amplitude, not discrete
| objects, which is why it makes sense that a partial
| differential equation like the Schrodinger equation can
| describe them. The prediction is that blobs will tend to spread
| out, split into smaller blobs, etc.) Early quantum physicists
| were disturbed by this, and added a collapse postulate claiming
| that the wave-function will sometimes spontaneously collapse,
| resulting in a single, linear world history rather than a
| branching one. To this day, spontaneous collapse has never been
| observed in an experiment.
| overgard wrote:
| My understanding is that the reason why the multiverse
| hypothesis (Everett interpretation) is popular with physicists
| is it simplifies the equations without losing predictive power.
| They actually have to add terms for the Copenhagen
| interpretation. I admittedly don't know the math well, but I
| think suggesting that it satisfies psychological needs is not
| generally accurate -- if anything, I think the average person
| finds the idea uncomfortable. Rather, it has legitimate
| explanatory and predictive power.
| colordrops wrote:
| I hate when Occam's razor is applied to non-scientific
| domains, but this is clearly a scientific domain, and it
| applies here - multiverse theory is the simpler of the two
| explanations.
| coliveira wrote:
| Occam's razor is not a law. It is just a heuristic to
| consider scientific hypothesis. If you believe something
| just because of Occam's razor (without any other evidence)
| I would say this is not very scientific.
| colordrops wrote:
| You are making a couple mistakes here. The first is that
| you are arguing with a straw man. I never said anything
| about it being a law. I also never said Occam's razor is
| science itself - I said that it's a tool to be applied in
| the scientific domain.
|
| The second mistake is that you don't seem to understand
| Occam's razor - yes, it is a heuristic, to determine
| which theory to weigh as more likely, due to limited time
| and scientific resources. Furthermore, the idea behind it
| is that, all else being equal, _including available
| evidence_ , you choose the simpler theory.
|
| If you had evidence that differentiated the two, you
| wouldn't need Occam's razor.
| [deleted]
| medstrom wrote:
| But you have to use it to counteract the intuition that
| only one universe is simpler. Occam's razor is a formal
| way to tell you, "hey your intuition is wrong, the other
| theory is the simpler one!" And for it to be useful to
| you, you can't just allow yourself to say "oh it is just
| a heuristic" when you don't like what it says. Instead
| you have to ask "what would I do if I deep down felt that
| many-worlds was simpler?" and act in accordance.
| lnanek2 wrote:
| Most likely true, but that doesn't mean it is useless.
| Adherents to the split universe religi...er...theory might be
| more content with their lives, experience less anxiety, etc..
| coliveira wrote:
| Exactly like in any other religion...
| CollinEMac wrote:
| So this is a $1.99 coin flipper?
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yes.
| sam_goody wrote:
| I have been using this for awhile, and am beginning to suspect
| that it is a hoax, and it is not really being sent to a lab in
| Geneva.
|
| (Looks at source code, finds HKCD random function..)
| aj7 wrote:
| Heh, heh. But of course.
| operator-name wrote:
| The unofficial Android app does an api call:
| https://github.com/tomicooler/UniverseSplitterUnofficial/blo...
| sam_goody wrote:
| Ahah! The API is sending a request to Canberra, Australia!
|
| I guess that proves that in the alternate universe, Geneva is
| in Australia!
|
| BTW, if you are into this sort of thing, I got this HDMI
| cable that lets you connect to a monitor on the "other side":
| https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B00KY2NKCO/
|
| :)
| [deleted]
| LinAGKar wrote:
| This only works if the many-worlds-interpretation is true, which
| has not been confirmed
| nkrisc wrote:
| And if we're in one of the universes where it is true.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| This is a common misconception, so if you're just joking I'll
| prepare myself to be wooshed in the hopes it helps someone
| else reading this. There is a concept of many universes which
| permits slightly differing laws of physics (actually
| different fundamental constants), but many worlds isn't that
| one. Many Worlds just says that quantum wavefunctions don't
| collapse. It doesn't posit any "universe" that the Copenhagen
| interpretation doesn't allow, it just lets them exist side by
| side.
| nkrisc wrote:
| It was a joke but your comment was interesting nonetheless.
| medstrom wrote:
| You sound like you'd be interested in Max Tegmark's "Our
| Mathematical Universe". There are probably multiple
| levels of multiverses, and in our local "stack" we have
| 4, where the Many Worlds mechanism is sitting on level 3.
| Some don't have this level 3, but may have fewer or more
| levels, using mechanisms foreign to this multiverse,
| depending on their laws of physics.
| beecafe wrote:
| It's not possible to distinguish between many worlds or any
| other interpretation, so it will never will be confirmed (nor
| will the Copenhagen interpretation). The only ones that can be
| confirmed are the "objective collapse" theories, as they
| produce very slightly different predictions than normal QM.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| I think it's fair to say that if we ever put a full human
| being into superposition with a large enough environment for
| decoherence to happen _within_ the experiment, many worlds is
| all but confirmed.
| zanecodes wrote:
| This relates to an interpretation of QM that I have not
| personally found much reading material on, the idea that
| wavefunction collapse is actually just entanglement; that
| is to say that as soon as a system in a superposition
| interacts with the outside universe, the outside universe
| becomes entangled with the system, thus putting the entire
| universe into a superposition where both outcomes are
| observed.
| psb wrote:
| I listened to a talk by David Deutsch and he talks about
| creating an quantum computer based AI and then asking the AI
| if there are other worlds - (hope I'm not remembering this
| wrong)
| samatman wrote:
| > _It 's not [currently] possible to distinguish between many
| worlds or any other interpretation so [unless or until that
| changes] it will never will be confirmed (nor will the
| Copenhagen interpretation)._
|
| Seems like the minimum editorializing to make your statement
| science and not religion, no?
| bsedlm wrote:
| > Within seconds, Universe Splitter(c) will receive the
| experiment's result and tell you which of the two universes
| you're in, and therefore which action to take
|
| if this thing is making my choices for me, then why not skip "the
| middle man" i.e. me?
|
| I sense a rising humanity motion (like rationalism, or the
| englightnement or whaterver) towards letting the algorithms make
| all of our choices. The new absolute monarch is the Algorithm.
| The Kings are dead, long live the algorithms!?
|
| disclaimer: as tha website is not serious but it does pretend to
| be, my own comment is also not entirely serious. Often difficult
| topics are better expressed through fiction (or partial fiction;
| fiction right now but maybe not later)
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| or just use /s on things that are going to make a lot of people
| scratch their head and say "wtf?"
| Angostura wrote:
| I've just bought this because I've never seen it before and it
| made both me and the wife laugh out loud.
| inetsee wrote:
| Where's the Universe where there's an Android version of this
| app?
| tasha0663 wrote:
| I'm in it. Are you? Is it Berenstein or Berenstain?
| operator-name wrote:
| You can use the unofficial Android app
| (https://github.com/tomicooler/UniverseSplitterUnofficial) or
| website another commenter made
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30500119)
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