Recent content by kered rettop

That's the trouble with you youngsters, always wanting everything yesterday. I tell you, if a story takes less than ten years to write, it's not worth reading. That's my excuse anyway. (Four years and counting.)

Most likely electrochemical. Electrolytic capacitors rely on the formation of an oxide layer on one plate. Hence you have one plate that is essentially metal and another that is highly oxidised, so it's not hard to imagine there will be some sort of battery action. Especially given that...

Posted in error, deleted, decluttered and reposted. Apologies to @weirdoguy for breaking the threading model. I can't believe I'm reading this! You can't just replace a state that I defined to be pure with one that is not and then imply that I'm trying to do the mathematically impossible with...

There are two idealised cases for the interaction between two molecules. The first idealised case treats the molecules' joint state as separable and pure. After the interaction, the joint state is no longer separable, the molecules are entangled. The entanglement is a coherent state - which...

I'm not saying it's going in two directions at once, I'm saying there are two different terms for the change in coherence corresponding to different idealised models. Both apply at once in a more realistic model.

I don't see why not. What's the problem with an interaction creating new entanglements and at the same time spreading previous entanglements?

Carroll and Sebens use observable outcomes to structure the branching, as they are talking about many worlds. So they say there are two branches. However they do also create sub-branches like the ones Saunders apparently refers to as branches. So a different name is needed: it's just semantics...

Oh yeah. sorry. The Interpretations forum doesn't have a B level.

PF operates in a rather unusual manner in that it aims to make sure everything is discussed within mainstream physics. So personal speculations are out. The moderators can be very strict about this. However, asking whether you've understood something seems to be fine, though you will be...

How do you square that? If simple symmetry arguments justify Carroll and Sebens's conclusion, how can the situation be more complicated? The slab of text you quoted from Saunders doesn't seem to have any bearing on their argument: it just tells the reader that decoherence is everywhere.

That is exactly what I'm "claiming". Alice measures a spin and creates a spin-up and a spin-down world. Bob measure temperature and creates an infinite ensemble of temperature-worlds. The splits intersect to create an infinite ensemble of [spin, temperature] worlds. Seems simple enough to me!

Yes, and if they don't then you don't. If you want to talk about probabilites then you need to specify which measured property(ies) you're talking about. If it's spin then all the states with spin-up belong in the spin-up world, regardless of temperature.

Not so. Worlds are characterised by the macroscopic phenomena, the observable outcomes. They are a single world. The objects you refer to are sub-branches. This is merely semantics and has no bearing on the validity of Carroll and Sebens's arguments.

There's no "could be considered" about it"! They do by the definition of "branch" as a macroscopic state corresponding to a macroscopic world with a particular outcome. ES reduces the slippery argument that "all my substates are equivalent so I assign equal probabilities to them" to the more...

The principle of indifference (PoI) is easy to abuse. This page explains the issues. "Simply stated, it suggests that if there are n possible outcomes and there is no reason to view one as more likely than another, then each should be assigned a probability of 1/n." "However, this principle has...