>I think another way to ask this is, can the amplitude
>of a wave function ever go to zero for all values of it's dependent
>variable?
Have you read Robin Hanson's 'Mangled Worlds' theory?
http://hanson.gmu.edu/mangledworlds.html
According to Hanson's theory:
"The mangled worlds approach to quantum mechanics is a variation on many
worlds that tries to resolve the Born rule problem by resorting only to
familiar decision theory, familiar physical processes, and a finite number
of worlds. The basic idea is that while we have identified physical
"decoherence" processes that seem to describe measurements, since they
produce decoupled wave components corresponding to different measurement
outcomes, these components are in fact not exactly decoupled. And while the
deviations from exact decoherence might be very small, the relative size of
worlds can be even smaller.
As a result, inexact decoherence can allow large worlds to drive the
evolution of very small worlds, "mangling" those worlds. Observers in
mangled worlds may fail to exist, or may remember events from larger worlds.
In either case, the only outcome frequencies that would be observed would be
those from unmangled worlds. Thus worlds below a certain size cutoff would
be mangled, and not count when calculating probabilities as the fraction of
worlds that see an outcome."
Received on Thu Sep 08 2005 - 02:45:30 PDT