Norman Samish wrote:
> I read Fabric of Reality several years ago, but didn't understand it
> well. I intuitively agree with Asher Peres that Deutsch's version of
> MWI too-flagrantly violates Occam's Razor. Perhaps I should read it
> again.
>
> I even attended a lecture by John Wheeler, David Deutsch's thesis
> advisor. He gave me the same sense of unease that FoR did.
>
> While I have no better explanation for quantum mysteries, I
> remain agnostic. "MWI's main conclusion is that the universe (or
> multiverse in this context) is composed of a quantum superposition of
> very many, possibly infinitely many, increasingly divergent,
> non-communicating parallel universes or quantum worlds." (Wikipedia)
>
> I also can't buy "wavefunction collapse."
If you don't buy MWI (or the more modestly name "relative state" version,
which is what Everett called it) then you have to "collapse" the
wavefunction some way. Decoherence theory has shown that a density matrix
for any instrument or observer is quickly diagonalized FAPP. So if you can
just ignored those 1e-100 cross-terms you're back to ordinary probabilities.
Then as Omnes' remarks, it's a probabilistic theory - which means it
predicts one thing happens and the others don't.
Brent Meeker
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Received on Sun Aug 06 2006 - 17:25:35 PDT