Does God play dice with the universe?
Dec. 10th, 2013 08:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackIt only recently occurred to me that people who objected to the non-deterministic nature of quantum mechanics were *right* if you think many-worlds interpretation is correct.
It's like, since Newton, physicists had a tacit assumption:
#1. The laws of physics are deterministic.
But then we discovered lots of evidence for QM that we couldn't ignore, and many people adopted a different assumption:
#2. The evidence for QM
And these seemed contradictory, so people who had #1 were (rightly) suspicious of #2, but people who accepted #2 felt they had no choice but to reject #1.
But was also assuming without even realising:
#3: there is only one universe, not a giant number of parallel universes
And it turns out that if you drop #3, you can keep #1 and #2.
Now, I don't think that's sufficient reason by itself to assume MWI. There are lots of other paradoxes that disappear (if QM works the way we think it does, though many physicists still think that is premature). But it's interesting that we might have to drop #1 one day, but not yet.
And I knew all that _in theory_, but I'd not actually stopped to think about Einstein's "god plays dice" quip since I learned slightly more about MWI.
It's like, since Newton, physicists had a tacit assumption:
#1. The laws of physics are deterministic.
But then we discovered lots of evidence for QM that we couldn't ignore, and many people adopted a different assumption:
#2. The evidence for QM
And these seemed contradictory, so people who had #1 were (rightly) suspicious of #2, but people who accepted #2 felt they had no choice but to reject #1.
But was also assuming without even realising:
#3: there is only one universe, not a giant number of parallel universes
And it turns out that if you drop #3, you can keep #1 and #2.
Now, I don't think that's sufficient reason by itself to assume MWI. There are lots of other paradoxes that disappear (if QM works the way we think it does, though many physicists still think that is premature). But it's interesting that we might have to drop #1 one day, but not yet.
And I knew all that _in theory_, but I'd not actually stopped to think about Einstein's "god plays dice" quip since I learned slightly more about MWI.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-10 12:39 pm (UTC)I've read about it, but don't have any good answers. My instinct is that the problem comes in our understanding of "how to translate physical reality to the subjective experience of being a conscious brain in that reality" not in our understanding of the underlying physical reality, but I'm not sure.
Eg. I think I've seen similar thought experiments that could happen in a purely classical world, which if true says this is a philosophical problem we need to understand, but QM just makes more common, isn't conceptually related to. But I'm not sure.