Re: Quantum Immortality = no second law

From: Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2008 00:17:15 -0700

nichomachus wrote:
>
>
> On Apr 17, 1:21 pm, Brent Meeker <meeke....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>> Telmo Menezes wrote:
>>> On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 2:37 PM, Bruno Marchal <marc....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>>>> Are you saying that the second law is verified in each of all
>>>> "branches" of the (quantum) multiverse?
>>> I'm not saying that.
>>>> I would say the second law is
>>>> statistical, and is verified in most branches. In the MWI applied to
>>>> quantum field it seems to me that there can be branches with an
>>>> arbitrarily high number of photon creation without annihilation, and
>>>> this for each period of time.
>> I'm not sure what source of photon creation you have in mind, but QFT
>> doesn't allow violation of energy conservation.
>
> Maybe it was vacuum energy Bruno was referring to, or else perhaps the
> creation of virtual particle pairs? Stephen Hawking (who by the way
> apparently regards Everett's theory as trivally true, in other words,
> instrumentalistic and without physical significance) used virtual
> particles to explain how black holes may evaporate. But I don't want
> to put words in anyone's mouth, and plus, I am not knowledgeable
> enough on these matters to discuss them.
>
> But if I may raise one possibility, it seems to me that despite the
> existence of fluke branches in which the second law is not inviolate,
> there are no possible branches that experience the outcome of a double
> slit experiment that does not result in an interference pattern.
>
> This is according to my understanding that the interference actually
> takes place across branches, as each path of the photon interferers
> constructively and destructively with itself.

But that interference is of the wave-function with itself. It's squared
modulus only determines a probability. So, thru a fluke of probability,
the photons could strike the screen in a pattern that is arbitrarily close
to the naive no-interference pattern. I say "arbitrarily close" since in
principle no photon could land where the probability was zero. But the zero
probability region is a line of measure zero.

It's not very clear to me how MWI accounts for the pattern. Is it supposed
that there is a separate world for every point each photon could land; the
separate worlds having a certain probability weight. Or are there multiple
worlds for each spot in order that the probability be proportional to the
number of worlds? And what if the probability is an irrational number?

Brent Meeker


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Received on Sat Apr 19 2008 - 03:17:28 PDT

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