Why the "Many-Worlds" Theory doesn't make sense...

What do you think that signifies? I want a palatable physical interpretation of QM and MWI isn't it for me.

PhysBang that was all pretty harsh. I admire Farsight's curiosity and he's no dummy. He does like goading for attention but many people here do. And not all of his arguments are without merit - for example, the speed of light is not constant in GR and I'm certain that Einstein would agree. I've seen folks go apoplectic when reading this and they try proving otherwise, eventually reducing things to "well, the LOCAL speed of light is constant!!" without ever granting a point to Farsight.

 

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I know where this is headed so I'll just preempt the next response. You can see from here that the issue is not as clear cut as many folks think it is.

The article says that we generally do consider the speed of light to be constant, but then clarifies that this rests are certain presumptions (such as the observer being in free fall). What this means is that, for example, the speed of light is NOT constant as you stand on the face of the Earth. If we restrict observation to only those in free fall then we are essentially making a circular argument.

I'd also like to make one more observation about Farsight: his responses are generally quite mature and devoid of personal attacks and name calling. It's easy enough to disagree with a poster without attacking their character (or at least it should be).

 

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No shit. But he routinely lies, often about me, and he clearly does not understand physics.

I will agree that he has a certain amount of guile. He is smart enough to try to craft some insults and to attempt to drive every conversation back to the same two quotations that he knows. However, he clearly, and admittedly, does not know the relevant mathematics. (Cue Farsight now retracting his earlier admission of mathematical ignorance.)

But Farsight's goal, and his half-baked idea, is that the local speed of light does change and that it changes for every system of coordinates. This Einstein explicitly denied in his mathematical theory. Your criticism of people who disagree with Farsight seems to be that you think that they should just let Farsight lie.

 

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You have got to be fucking kidding me.

He routinely lies. He routinely insults people. He has been banned from many places because of this.

 

He's admitted to being banned at other sites but around here the ad hominems are directed at him in a 10-to-1 ratio. Maybe I'm wrong but that's my impression.

 

Except that that's what most physicists would mean by "the speed of light" if they don't further qualify it, as well as the meaning that's most relevant for understanding the geometrical foundation of GR and the speed of light you'll see in the mathematical formulation. The "c" appearing in this expression of the Einstein field equation is a simple constant, independent of position or time, for example.

Actually it's basically meaningless, as the FAQ explains:

In more practical terms, if you try to do an experiment to "measure the speed of light" in your room on Earth, then not only could you measure a different speed at different locations, but different experimental setups will probably disagree with each other on what that speed is and there'd be no reason to pick one of them and say it was "the speed of light".

 

The FAQ in question is Is the Speed of Light Constant? and it says this about Einstein's variable speed of light:

"This interpretation is perfectly valid and makes good physical sense, but a more modern interpretation is that the speed of light is constant in general relativity."

That's true. Einstein spoke about the speed of light varying with position and being spatially variable, but people like pryzk are uncomfortable with this because they've been taught the modern interpretation. Unfortunately the article then finishes up with this:

"Finally, we come to the conclusion that the speed of light is not only observed to be constant; in the light of well tested theories of physics, it does not even make any sense to say that it varies."

As such it contradicts itself. I pointed this out to editor Don Koks, and after some discussion, he wrote a new article Is The Speed of Light Everywhere the Same? It says things like this:

"Einstein talked about the speed of light changing in his new theory. In the English translation of his 1920 book "Relativity: the special and general theory" he wrote: "according to the general theory of relativity, the law of the constancy of the velocity [Einstein clearly means speed here, since velocity (a vector) is not in keeping with the rest of his sentence] of light in vacuo, which constitutes one of the two fundamental assumptions in the special theory of relativity [...] cannot claim any unlimited validity. A curvature of rays of light can only take place when the velocity [speed] of propagation of light varies with position." This difference in speeds is precisely that referred to above by ceiling and floor observers."

Since the Einstein digital papers are now online, one can readily find more examples of Einstein's opinion on the matter, such as this. It's easy to understand that the locally measured speed of the light is always the same because of a tautology where the local motion of light defines our second and our metre, and we then use them to measure the local motion of light, see http://arxiv.org/abs/0705.4507.

With the exception of physicforums years back where in my niavity I set up sockpuppets, I've been banned elsewhere for having a good physics knowledge. At a lot of sites you will find a "moderator" who gives free rein to obnoxious abusive trolls, whilst playing thought-police and defending orthodoxy. Correct him at your peril!

 

deleted: double post

 

It's not like I bookmark this shit. When I have some time, I'll look it up.

Fortunately, Farsight just lied above, where he said he was banned for having "good physics knowledge". Here is the reason: http://cosmoquest.org/forum/showthread.php?30979-Suspended-banned-posters-log&p=1643015#post1643015

 

It's easy to look at Cosmoquest and see my posts, for example here's where I had a run-in with moderator tusanfem. See post #65. I didn't say anything particularly bad, and I gave references to support my position. If you log in you can look at all my posts. You can see I'm civil and factual as usual. There's no lies, and not much in the way of insults, just like my postings here.

 

Since Farsight's pet model has nothing to do with this thread (at least as far as I can tell), let's try to put it back on track.

RJBeery: I think you and I would agree that the Many World Interpretation is: 1. likely impossible to disprove, 2. supported by a number of qualified scientists, and 3. not satisfying at all. My question to you is: what interpretation do you support? I find myself in the 'shut up and calculate' camp, not by choice but because none of the interpretations I've heard seem to make any sense. It sounds like you won't settle for that, though, so what is your alternative of choice?

 

A voice of reason, thank you. I do have a pet theory with some compelling attributes but I'm still developing it. Of the mainstream interpretations, I would relate most closely with the Transactional one only because it provides a mechanism for "retrocausality", with which you can do away with this physical wavefunction stuff...

 

I did a quick google of the transactional interpretation, and at first blush I'm impressed. It certainly makes more intuitive sense to me than any other interpretation I've seen. This link, published in Reviews of Modern Physics, seems to provide a good discussion. For casual readers, here's a quick summary as I understand it:

Maxwell's equations, like most laws of physics, are time symmetric. When one uses them to derive the behavior of radiation in electrodynamics, one always comes up with both "retarded" and "advanced" waves, which propagate forward and backward in time, respectively. Typically, one invokes the direction of causality to discard the advanced solutions, since they seem to have no manifestation in nature. The results are time-directed dynamics in which one particle can emit radiation waves and another can absorb them. But apparently one can also leave the advanced waves in, producing time-symmetric electrodynamics in which the "emitter" passes a retarded wave to the "absorber" and the absorber sends an advanced wave back to the emitter. More recently, this approach was generalized to all interactions in quantum field theory, and it provably gives all the same predictions.

If interactions are thought of in this way, signalling between points in spacetime becomes fundamentally two-way. When an observer measures the state of an entangled particle and enacts "spooky action at a distance" on its counterpart, what's really happening is that the measurer is sending an advanced signal back in time to modify the particle while the entangling interaction was occurring. Again, this interpretation makes all the same predictions as shut-up-and-calculate quantum mechanics, so it doesn't allow any causality violations or FTL communication. But it does modify the definition of "causality" such that the future and past exhibit symmetric causal influences on each other. To use the language of an excellent talk I just heard from Howard Wiseman, this interpretation violates the Reichenbach Principle of Common Cause, as any realistic (in the sense of "preserving realism") interpretation must.

As a final note, this quote from the above linked paper jumped out at me:

If I'm understanding this right, it means the transactional interpretation just formalizes the idea that the universe is a self-consistent, 4D object and quantum entanglement is a manifestation of its self-consistency. Of course thinking of the universe as a 4D whole raises questions of its own, perhaps most notably "why do we experience time in instants rather than all at once?" But relativity has been raising those same questions for almost a century, so I don't mind too much if quantum mechanics joins the club.

 

When I first became interested in interpretations I thought I liked The Transactional Interpretation the best though more likely I didn't really understand any of them well enough to have a favorite. That was pretty good. Thanks.

 

Breaking my vow of silence here at SF, this old thread at another forum site indicates mine and others views on the sanity or otherwise of retrocausality aka transactional QM:
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/does-cmbr-include-free-photons.558253/

 

I merely responded to dishonest accusations and demonstrated that I was civil and unfairly banned, I didn't instigate the derail.

It's yet more pseudoscience nonsense that doesn't stand up to scrutiny, just like many-worlds. Time is not something through which we can move, either forwards or backwards. A clock clocks up some kind of regular cyclical local motion and shows a cumulative result that we call the time. That motion is not through time, either forwards or backwards. There is no such thing as negative motion, and there are no waves that "propagate back in time".

It isn't valid. Think about the CMBR photons. They were emitted 13.8 billion years ago, give or take 300,000 years. Their absorption now or in the future has nothing to do with their emission.

Anybody who has examined the nature of time can work out that this is poppycock.

James: please reinstate my thread time travel is science fiction. A malicious moderator moved it to "alternative theories", even though it's bona-fide science backed with robust references.

Don't. I would urge you to read up on weak measurement work by Aephraim Steingberg et al and by Jeff Lundeen et al. See this on Jeff's website:

"With weak measurements, it’s possible to learn something about the wavefunction without completely destroying it. As the measurement becomes very weak, you learn very little about the wavefunction, but leave it largely unchanged. This is the technique that we’ve used in our experiment. We have developed a methodology for measuring the wavefunction directly, by repeating many weak measurements on a group of systems that have been prepared with identical wavefunctions. By repeating the measurements, the knowledge of the wavefunction accumulates to the point where high precision can be restored. So what does this mean? We hope that the scientific community can now improve upon the Copenhagen Interpretation, and redefine the wavefunction so that it is no longer just a mathematical tool, but rather something that can be directly measured in the laboratory."

 

The many worlds and multi-dimensions theory is not new. It is a rehash of ancient thinking. For example, Hell was thought to be in the center of the earth, while heaven was in the clouds. Since we, science, can't see anything physical that would explain these place, one would conclude either these places are not there, or if there they were there, they would need to exist in another dimension that overlaps. Jesus said, My kingdom is not of this realm; spiritual and not material realm. The multi-worlds theory is a new recording of an old song. If the young people are not aware of its origins, due to being atheists, they will assume this is cutting edge.

These, multi-realm theories, in both cases, came/come from mind perception based on using certain subroutines of the mind. As an example, before I explain hows and whys, consider music. Music has no center to its universe, because there are so many styles and genre; Grand Ole Opre, Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame, Symphony Hall. We can trace the origins or the BB of human music far back into history, but since the beginning, music expanded exponentially from many centers, simultaneously.

There is no logic in terms of being able to predict the next hit song, other than we know one will appear. The musician starts with a nebulous hunch, that takes form into the next shining star. The hit, appears to be randomly generated, and hard to predict until it finally materializes. Notice the dynamics of music creation, that is created entirely in the human brain, parallels our modern perception of the universe. The reason is both use the same processing schema, with this underlying perception. This is called emotional thinking and is how the music universe evolves in parallel. The modern multi-universe theory and ancient thinking both use this processing schema.

The Hows and Whys


In terms of how and why perception can default; when memory is created, the limbic system, in the center of the brain, adds emotional tags to memory, as it writes memory to the cerebral. The net effect is each memory is composed of both thought and feeling, working as a composite. Our strongest and longest last memories have the strongest feelings; youth, marriage, death, trauma, etc.

Because memory is a composite of thought and feeling, we can consciously approach our memory from either side of the binary to induce memory. We can have a feeling and thoughts will appear. For example, we can feel hungry and thoughts of food items might appear. Or, we can think and a feeling will appear. We can think of our favorite food, and a hunger feeling will appear. Although both paths can induce memory, each path processes memory in a different way.

If we start from the feeling side, the memory processing will diverge. If we start from thoughts, the memory processing will converge. As an example, if we start from a hunger feeling, a wide variations of food items can appear because all these memory have been tagged with the same hunger feeling. Most people eat different foods for breakfast, lunch and dinner, with each of these meals, variable, based on the day of the week. One feeling; hunger, can lead to a divergence; meal and time of week, since there are so many things or memories, that have this one feeling tag. The brain will randomize. This brain sub-routine, leading to divergence and randomization, affects perception. The unconscious is the creative source

If we go the other way, from the thought side, and fixate on each food item, in the wide range of food items we might eat in one week, since these all have the same hunger tag, they will all converge to one feeling. This approach and sub-routine adds a converging affect to perception.

As a working example, Liberalism is all about appeasing feelings. As such, diversity a predictable artifact of divergence of thought due to their consistent feeling approach toward memory. The problem is, since they will see reality in the image of this perception bias, it will be hard to get convergent ideas and meaning across. Convergence does not seem to jive with their unconscious filters of the mind, which they assume is natural and instinctive. This causes them to see a random world where there is no set routine for lunch or dinner but all foods have rights all times a day.

Multi-universe and the random universe are divergent theory, connected to emotional thinking. Physics has run out of songs with only the genre that re available (one universe), so another genre center needs to appear; rap music. This will allow other random connections, between this other realms, where the whims of the gods can help and hurt. It is an artifact of divergent perception, which millions share.

On the other hand, using C as the ground state of the universe; C-level, comes from a convergent perception of the universe based on the thought side approach to memory. This one reference converges all things to one reference or feeling. But most of modern physics is divergent minded, due to feeling first; randomizer effect, such that this will not register as proper perception.

Both approaches to memory are valid, yet both lead different ways. In my opinion, the emotion first approach is better for the individual ego, since it can randomize joy in a hostile world. One can think of a happy place while living in poverty. This may detach from reality, but it can sooth the soul. The thought first approach is better of the collective, since it maintains the same reality for all, via convergence. It moors our egos all moored the same place, so as we each fly into the blue skies of emotion, first, which randomize to the world, we can each play our own songs.

 

Those damn athiest are preventing people from learning about that great physicist Jesus.