I just finished reading "The 5 Ages of the Universe" by Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin, and there was a bit in the beginning describing the vast emptiness of the universe -- that if you were to travel in a straight line in space the odds of you hitting something are 1 in a billion trillion.
So...
This brings up an interesting question: could we design a probe (today) that would eventually return to Earth's orbit after making a "lap" around the galaxy?
Would make for an interesting time capsule!
On large scales you have probabilities that can accurately predict what's going to happen (like radioactive decay), however on a quantum scale you cannot predict with any accuracy what's going on in that region of space.
At the time of the Big Bang, the universe was smaller than Planck's...
I saw this on an episode of The Universe. If you dug a tunnel between ANY two points on Earth it will always take the same amount of time to "fall" to the other side. Although I thought the time was on the order of ~40 minutes not 18.
You have to excuse me, I'm a layman with no university education in physics and QM -- but I find it fascinating.
Having said that, my understanding of WHAT a "waveform collapse" is:
I know particles also behave as waves as the famous two slit experiment shows. The video I watched regarding...
Now my understanding is that the act of observation which causes the collapse is NOT due to the detecting device interacting with the particles. I think I remember reading in "The Whole Shebang" that they crafted experiments that removed that possibility and still got the same results. It...
I agree that the thought of the universe continuously splitting into all probable possibilities sounds ridiculous. But is it any more ridiculous than waveform collapse being dependent on an observer?
What other mainstream interpretations exist besides Copenhagen and MWI that explain the...
Actually, you would. Remember, we're talking about the moment in time the branching takes place -- when the machine determines if you won or lost the lottery depending on your numbers. By killing the "yous" that lost (thus ending your consciousness) the only active consciousnesses are the ones...
The question is what possibilities can be realized? In your example you have two universes: one where a person j-walks and the other does not (dead/live). However, push the point closer to where we have a j-walker getting hit by a bus. In one universe he dies and in the other universes he...
Fascinating stuff. I suspect you've already read this, but here's the Wikipedia article on MWI in regards to the Quantum Suicide experiment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide