Re: Changing the past by forgetting

From: Stephen Paul King <stephenk1.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sun, 15 Mar 2009 22:30:36 -0400

Hi Brent,

    But does not MWI imply that if we could somehow erase all (retrivable!)
records of a measurement, that we would - in effect - be culling that
branch from the Tree?


----- Original Message -----
From: "Brent Meeker" <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>
To: <everything-list.domain.name.hidden>
Sent: Sunday, March 15, 2009 10:06 PM
Subject: Re: Changing the past by forgetting


snip

>... Even more telling experiments have already been done in which
> the "measurement" was just the unrecorded IR radiation from buckyballs.
> Buckyballs which were sufficiently cold showed the 2-slit interference
> pattern
> in a Young's slit type experiment. But when they were warm enough to emit
> IR
> radiation that, if detected, could have localized them, the interference
> disappeared. So it is not only a matter of the experimenter not looking
> at the
> result, the rest of the universe has to not look too.
>
> Brent

    It is sad that Einstein was not made aware of this implication of QM. If
he was, his thought about the "moon not being there when I'm not looking at
it" would not have formed. I wish we had a better sense of exactly how
decoherence worked such that we could quantify how there might be "parts" of
a system's wave function that are entagled with its environment and other
parts that are not...

Onward!

Stephen


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Received on Sun Mar 15 2009 - 22:30:43 PDT

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