- #1
Quotidian
- 98
- 14
Sean Carroll's most recent book is called Something Deeply Hidden, and is premissed on the idea that the Everett interpretation of the 'observer problem' in quantum physics is correct. Carroll, and several other prominent scientific popularisers including David Deutsche and Max Tegmark, are convinced that this interpretation, bizarre and outlandish as it sounds to many people, is correct, and that the world as we know it is constantly 'splitting' into infinite replicas, where everything that could happen, does.
Phillip Ball's essay in Quanta criticizes this idea, concluding that 'Its implications undermine a scientific description of the world far more seriously than do those of any of its rivals. The MWI tells you not to trust empiricism at all: Rather than imposing the observer on the scene, it destroys any credible account of what an observer can possibly be.'
Myself, I'm not a physicist, but I have a casual interest in philosophy, and I agree with Phillip Ball. There's an interesting Scientific American article The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III. It says 'Everett’s scientific journey began one night in 1954, he recounted two decades later, “after a slosh or two of sherry.” He and his Princeton classmate Charles Misner and a visitor named Aage Petersen (then an assistant to Niels Bohr) were thinking up “ridiculous things about the implications of quantum mechanics.” During this session Everett had the basic idea behind the many-worlds theory, and in the weeks that followed he began developing it into a dissertation.' It recounts how when he submitted his thesis (to Wheeler), he was encouraged to play down the notion of the world dividing or splitting, but that when the idea finally became popularised by Bryce DeWitt, this aspect was very much emphasised.
So, there's a saying that 'desperate problems call for desperate solutions'. If the Many Worlds Interpretation is a solution, then what is the problem? Or, put another way, if for some unforseeable reason it was finally discovered that there couldn't actually be 'many worlds', Sean Carroll and David Deutsche would have to admit that ... .
Fill in the blank.
Phillip Ball's essay in Quanta criticizes this idea, concluding that 'Its implications undermine a scientific description of the world far more seriously than do those of any of its rivals. The MWI tells you not to trust empiricism at all: Rather than imposing the observer on the scene, it destroys any credible account of what an observer can possibly be.'
Myself, I'm not a physicist, but I have a casual interest in philosophy, and I agree with Phillip Ball. There's an interesting Scientific American article The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III. It says 'Everett’s scientific journey began one night in 1954, he recounted two decades later, “after a slosh or two of sherry.” He and his Princeton classmate Charles Misner and a visitor named Aage Petersen (then an assistant to Niels Bohr) were thinking up “ridiculous things about the implications of quantum mechanics.” During this session Everett had the basic idea behind the many-worlds theory, and in the weeks that followed he began developing it into a dissertation.' It recounts how when he submitted his thesis (to Wheeler), he was encouraged to play down the notion of the world dividing or splitting, but that when the idea finally became popularised by Bryce DeWitt, this aspect was very much emphasised.
So, there's a saying that 'desperate problems call for desperate solutions'. If the Many Worlds Interpretation is a solution, then what is the problem? Or, put another way, if for some unforseeable reason it was finally discovered that there couldn't actually be 'many worlds', Sean Carroll and David Deutsche would have to admit that ... .
Fill in the blank.