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Originally Posted by
Cioran
Of course it doesn't. Even if the sun revolved around the earth, special relativity can be shown to be true regardless in hundreds of different ways. Of course, SR cannot be wholly correct, since it is subsumed by general relativity, and there still needs to be a way to reconcile GR with QM.
Does the earth revolve around the sun, or does the sun revolve around the earth? Can you answer the question?
I know you are addressing, mal4mac, but I just want to say that he does make a point.
The results of the Michelson-Morley experiment suggest either that the earth is the center of the universe or there must be some other explanation. Since scientists would not accept that the earth is the center of the universe, Einstein went for a different explanation. That explanation led to predictions that worked.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Cioran
Now, as to the substance of your example, you are implying that these are my arguments for Everettian Many Worlds, i.e., invalid ad hom formulations. This is pure BS, of course. I have explained repeatedly why there are good grounds to accept Everett (as many and perhaps most physicists now do), and none of them have anything whatever to do with the strawman caricature you just invented above.
I don't see any good grounds to accept Everett's many worlds theory. I don't think most physicists do either, but I don't know. They may use various sums of histories as techniques to make calculations, but that doesn't mean they accept the reality of many worlds. Even if they did, this is not a popularity contest.
Here is a comment by R. F. Streater in "Lost causes in theoretical physics" that seems to represent well my own view of the subject: http://www.mth.kcl.ac.uk/~streater/lostcauses.html#XII
There is nothing to the many-worlds theory. There are no theorems, conjectures, experimental predictions or results of any sort, other than those of Hilbert space. It is not a cogent idea.
I don't know who Streater is, but what he says makes sense and there is at least one person out there who is not on the MWI bandwagon.
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Originally Posted by
Cioran
1. Wave function collapse is completely unexplained in Copenhagen and other collapse interpretations, making it unscientific and akin to magic. MW does away with wave function collapse, solving this problem.
I think MWI violates the conservation of mass-energy of classical physics as well as the conservation of quantum information. I don't accept some other world where Santa can shrink enough to get down the chimney as a way out of needing to meet these conservation laws across the entire multiverse whether that contains one or many universes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Cioran
2. In addition to wave function collapse, other unexplained (and probably unexplainable) properties of Copenhagen and other non-MWI interpretations include spooky action at a distance and indeterminacy. Spooky action at a distance and indeterminacy vanish under MWI,
The other worlds are even spookier and offer nothing except a way to take a reactionary position in an effort to maintain an outdated determinacy in the face of evidence against it. The fact that indeterminacy vanishes in MWI is evidence that MWI is not a model for QM.
I noticed in Deutsch's The Fabric of Reality, chapter 13, that he was complaining that physicists do not accept the MWI. He was positioning himself as some sort of scientific revolutionary, when all he looked like to me was an old-school physicist refusing to get out of the way.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Cioran
3. The universe is an isolated system. Isolated systems are in superposition. Therefore, the universe is in superposition. Therefore, the parsimonious assumption is that MWI reflects how the world is.
I don't see any other worlds. The wave behavior of particles can be modeled using standard QM without resorting to other worlds. One day, we may understand more about the superposition of particle states, so there is no need to jump to a superposition of worlds to resolve anything especially since making that leap of faith gives us nothing in return.