Does the MWI require "creation" of multiple worlds?

  • Context: Graduate 
  • Thread starter Thread starter PeterDonis
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Creation Multiple Mwi
Join the discussion
Ask a follow-up here, or get your own question answered by working scientists, mathematicians and engineers — people, not an autocomplete.
Real named experts · corrections over time · the nuance an AI answer skips
183 replies · 21K views
stevendaryl said:
That's the assumption that our world is "typical". So you're both making that assumption and denying it, it seems to me.
No.

In common English, to call something typical means that one has seen many similar things of the same kind, and only a few were very different from the typical instance. So one can call a run of coin flips typical if its frequency of heads is around 50% and atypical if it was a run where the frequency is outside the $5\sigma$ threshold required, e.g., for proofs of a new particle (see https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/31126/ ), with a grey zone in between.

This is the sense I am using the term. All this happens within a single world. It is not the world that is typical but a particular event or sequence of events.

But I have no idea what it should means for the single world we have access to to be ''typical''. To give it a meaning one would have to compare it with speculative, imagined, by us unobservable, other worlds. Thus calling a world typical is at the best completely subjective and speculative, and at the worst, completely meaningless.
 
  • Like
Likes   Reactions: PeterDonis
Physics news on Phys.org
A. Neumaier said:
No.

In common English, to call something typical means that one has seen many similar things of the same kind, and only a few were very different from the typical instance. So one can call a run of coin flips typical if its frequency of heads is around 50% and atypical if it was a run where the frequency is outside the $5\sigma$ threshold required, e.g., for proofs of a new particle (see https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/31126/ ), with a grey zone in between.

This is the sense I am using the term. All this happens within a single world. It is not the world that is typical but a particular event or sequence of events.

But I have no idea what it should means for the single world we have access to to be ''typical''. To give it a meaning one would have to compare it with speculative, imagined, by us unobservable, other worlds. Thus calling a world typical is at the best completely subjective and speculative, and at the worst, completely meaningless.
Just remember, hair-splitting is irrelevant to world-splitting.

Funnily enough I can understand Steven's language in what appears, admittedly to my vague sort of mind, to be perfectly well-defined terms. Personally I translate "typical" into something useful about confidence limits.
 
Last edited:
stevendaryl said:
There is no collapse in Many Worlds.
aren't the many worlds theoretical-
 
Derek P said:
? @StevenDarryl was describing the smooth evolution of the emergent worlds. It was not even remotely a reformulation of MWI.

You may believe so but MWI asserts exactly the opposite.
See this article - but only if you don't mind Vongher's provocative style.
that article above--See this article--- - fails simply because the use of Wikipedia makes research infotainment. Plus a lot of thought experiments. Neumaier has it spot on-