Memories of the 28th Century
Realities of Quantum Theory: Free Will and Time Travel
by , 07-16-2013 at 04:55 PM (5409 Views)
Possible impacts of physical proof that there are Many Worlds on the argument whether humans have free will and on time travel.
It has been known for a very long time that all events are governed by causality, the endless chain of cause and effect. This endless chain is widely regarded as determining everything, eliminating the possibility of free will in human activities. How can we truly have free will if everything is caused by causes that can’t even been seen because they occurred far in the past? However that reasoning assumed that everything that existed was in this space-time, except for Heaven and Hell, maybe. Although there has been debates about free will for a long time; the answer has been determined by causality. But I recently learned that solid, physical evidence showing the accuracy of the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Theory was created in a laboratory experiment. A small piece of metal was seen to be in two states at the same time, which indicated that the wave function of the particles did not resolve into a single state, as the Copenhagen Interpretation predicted, and the piece of metal was large enough to be visible with the naked eye.
This may seem irrelevant or insignificant to the discussion of free will, but it tells us that causality was causing more than one thing at a time, at least in some situations. It has been theorized that the alternative that did not end up in this space-time ended up in a different one, and that there are many and maybe infinitely many space-times. We can’t tell where the other options are, but that idea is the best one available. Those other space-times are also places where the other side of any number of decisions could actually have happened.
I will confess that I was a fence sitter on free will until a few months ago, when the causality argument convinced me that we have no real choices. The choices were decided at the time of the Big Bang, because there simply was no other way that things could have happened. My personality is such that I would have preferred to have the ability to make real choices, but I could not see any way around the matter, until I learned that there really are other space-times.
Writers have been playing with the idea of multiverses for several decades, so the concept is not foreign, but it is convenient, and it leads me to think that some of the more unlikely possibilities actually do exist. Some of the ideas that have been dreamed up may also have physical existence, but there is no way to access those other realities. The piece of metal that was seen having two states was separated from this space-time as much as possible (vacuum and extremely low temperature). For fiction I was thinking of ways to isolate a time machine from the rest of this space-time, and the best that I could think of was a using a vacuum metalizer (essentially a large thermos bottle). Then something would have to be done complete the insulation.
I can’t think of any other way to get out of this space-time, and that method might leave the travelers in a hyper-space, between space-times. I have not yet thought of a reliable way to propel that kind of time machine, but having the insulation incomplete might do something, and changing some of the physical constants for the thing might also do something. It’s worth trying both methods. If you can think of any possible methods of propulsion, then please let me know.
Then there was the syllogismobile that Harold Shea used. Maybe that would work.
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