Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Gribbin
Read between
February 7 - March 2, 2018
This is the idea of the ‘Multiverse’. It is often, though not always, associated with the idea of ‘anthropic cosmology’, which suggests that we see around us a Universe just right for life because there is a multitude of universes with different physical laws, and life forms like us can only exist in universes like ours. The others are sterile, so there is nobody there to notice what their strange laws of physics are.
Apparently this whole book takes the multiverse for granted--specifically the Everett Multiverse. The multiverse could exist, it would be convenient if it did, and therefore it must.
In an Infinite Universe, Anything Is Possible
Sounds nice, but is really quite silly. A square circle becomes possible? An all powerful god who creates a boulder so big he can't lift it? A universe that violates the law of non contradiction? An infinite universe doesn't make the impossible, possible. It simply makes the impossible infinitely impossible.
It was an early example of a ‘many worlds’ hypothesis, using the term ‘world’ in one of its many alternative meanings as a synonym for ‘planet’.
World=planet Demonstrates the lack of clarity in the "many worlds" approach.
And he points out that ‘I have read something like it elsewhere - The slithy toves Did gyre and gimbal in the wabe’4 In this regard, nothing has changed in the past eighty years. We still don’t know what electrons (or other quantum entities) are, nor how they do the things they do.
Honest ignorance. Not a bad thing.
The more a quantum entity is constrained by circumstances to act like a wave, the less certain it is where the entity is located. The more it is constrained to act like a particle, the less certainty there is about where it is going.
Could this be because we are four dimensional creatures watching a 4+ dimensional action? Maybe it is predictable but we simply can't tie it down to our limited understanding?
There’s more. The experimenters can set up detectors to look at the two holes, and monitor which one each electron goes through. When they do this, they never see the electron going through both holes at once. They see it go through one hole or the other. And when they do this, there is no interference pattern. The spots on the screen form two blobs, one behind each hole, just as you would expect if they were made by particles. The electrons also seem to know if they are being watched or not - and the same is true for photons and all other quantum entities.
Fascinating. Observations altering results. I wonder: does it change if you add the observation in mid experiment? Why don't observers interfere with each other? It seems that an observation, any observation, collapses the wave form in a specific way.
In Everett’s theory, although he did not express it in quite this way, there is no special universe in the Multiverse - all quantum states are equally real. Combining this with Einstein’s insight, all observers in the Multiverse are equally entitled to their point of view.
Everett is postmodernism applied to physics.
All observers are equally real. Although the Many World’s Interpretation is not the only version of the Multiverse, there is nothing in any of the variations on the theme to refute this insight.
Interesting use of the term "insight." That presumes the accuracy of the statement.
[The] total lack of effect of one branch on another also implies that no observer will ever be aware of any ‘splitting’ process.
But if there is absolutely no effect of one branch upon another, how are they connected at all?
Arguments that the world picture presented by this theory is contradicted by experience, because we are unaware of any branching process, are like the criticism of the Copernican theory that the mobility of the earth as a real physical fact is incompatible with the common sense interpretation of nature because we feel no such motion.
Whether the overall idea is true or not, this rejoinder is balderdash. There are many ways to directly observe and measure Copernican motion besides feeling it.
In both cases the argument falls when it is shown that the theory itself predicts that our experience will be what in fact it is.
This is in itself a contradiction. He just said it cannot be directly observed. How then can we "experience" it, let alone know of our experience lines up with it?
That possibility is time travel.
But do parallel worlds make meaningful forward in time even possible? If, in the future, all branches are actual, would there be no place in particular to "land" because all places are actual but none more real than the other? Would a successful attempt mean that the traveler was actually spilt Infinitely?
The best reason for taking the Many Worlds Interpretation seriously is that nobody has ever found any other way to describe the entire Universe in quantum terms.
This is awful reasoning. If you substituted "God" for "Many Worlds" and tried this nonsense people would suddenly become mockingly indignant.
One of the great scientific achievements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been to establish that the Universe did begin in a Big Bang, almost exactly 13.7 billion years ago, and has been expanding ever since in line with the description of space and time provided by the general theory of relativity.
If this is true, then the "Many Worlds" hypothesis says nothing to the cosmological argument. It represents every possible arrangement of matter created in the Big Bang, as it passes through cause and effect in finite time. It does not address the possibility of the Big Bang occurring in the first place or why there could be no personal cause involved.
We can only hope that things turned out better for all of them in some of the other universes.
Many Worlds used as a form of religion.
It is quantum physics that gives a solid scientific basis to the Multiverse idea; but it is the existence of an array of cosmic coincidences that points up the need for such an idea in the first place.
Tacit admission that the modern multiverse is an attempt to avoid the implications of design.
People are the most complex things known in the Universe, because we are made of a very large number of atoms (roughly 1028) linked together in complicated ways.
Interesting.
If there is a choice of universes - if the Multiverse is real - then the observed value of the cosmological constant is exactly what it should be for universes within the Multiverse that are suitable homes for life forms like us. The evidence for the Multiverse is building up.
How is this, by itself, evidence for a multiverse? It would seem to mainly be evidence that there is a reason why this universe is the way it is.
The best analogy is with a lottery, where six numbers have to be chosen to have a chance of winning the big prize. Suppose several million people each choose their own sets of six numbers, then one set of numbers is pulled out as the winner. After the event, the winning ticket seems special. But in a more fundamental way, there is nothing special about that set of numbers. By the very nature of the lottery, somebody has to win, and before the draw is made each ticket has an equal chance of winning. Somebody had to get lucky.
This is a terrible, tired analogy. This presumes a million chances in one instance, instead of a series of instances where the chances are a million to one. If you havea million chances in one instant, some one is "bound to get lucky." If you have a succession of instances where you have one chance and the chance it's always a million to one, the number of instances you have doesn't change the probability. The lottery is designed for someone to win it. If we suggest that a naturalistic universe is the same, we just beg the question.
Deutsch is completely convinced of the reality of the Multiverse, and takes the Many Worlds Interpretation entirely at face value. He accepts that there is, for example, a vast array of universes with different versions of himself in them, so that in some he is (not ‘might be’, really is) a Professor in Cambridge instead of working in Oxford, while in others he is not a scientist at all. On a larger scale, there are many science fiction stories with ‘alternative histories’, in which, say, the dinosaurs never died out but developed human-level intelligence and a civilization to match our own.
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Accepted by blind faith in an unobservable reality and then posited as irrefutable. In a sense, it is because that which cannot be proven using evidence cannot be refuted with it either.
In the early twenty-first century, two startling ideas have emerged for serious consideration as an explanation of the Universe we see around us, within the context of the Multiverse of string theory. The first is that our universe is a computer simulation - in other words, a fake. This idea is taken seriously by a surprisingly large number of eminent cosmologists, but in my view they are barking up the wrong tree, for reasons I will explain. The second idea is less fashionable, but in my view far more compelling. It is that our Universe is an artificial construct, manufactured deliberately by
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Fascinating that these are acceptable while God is not.
with no need for outside intervention.
But on what assumption do we proceed here? Why is outside intervention so profoundly threatening to the author that it must be ruled out a priori?
Jonathan Weiner’s book The Beak of the Finch goes into absorbing detail on this. Natural selection has also been seen at work in laboratory experiments, with creatures such as fruit flies who have short lifespans and can be studied over many generations.
In micro evolution, most certainly. No fruit fly has ever become anything other that a fruit fly, however. It's amazing how we can shift definitions with such ease and also such obtuseness.
There is no need for an intelligent designer to explain how we got to be the way we are, given the laws of physics that operate in our Universe.
But who can explain the laws of physics or even their existence?
