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From: king%Kestrel@sri-unix.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.physics
Subject: Re: Quantum Mechanics
Message-ID: <451@sri-arpa.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 29-Jul-85 19:26:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.451
Posted: Mon Jul 29 19:26:49 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 1-Aug-85 21:05:42 EDT
Lines: 51

From:  king@Kestrel (Dick King)

    The multiple worlds interpretation has some severe problems at the
    macroscopic human level.  These problems were explored quite some time
    ago in fiction by Borghes in ``The Garden of Forking Paths'' and more
    recently, and more devastatingly, by Niven in ``All the Myriad Ways''.
    The basic problem is that if all quantum possibilities are followed,
    then the orderliness we seem to observe in our macroscopic lives is an
    illusion peculiar to the absurdly rare paths through the space of
    multiple worlds in which what we consider normal sequences of events
    happen to be preserved.

The basic reason why ordinary things happen most of the time is that
that although the common occurrence is only one "thing", the ordinary
events can happen in a great many more ways than bizzaire things.
Example:  Suppose I sit in a room with a million air molecules, and I
will die instantly and horribly if my half of the room contains more
than 600K or less than 400K molecules.

There are 1000000!/500000!*500000! ways the air molecules can be
divided exactly evenly.  This is an absurdly large number,
approximately 500000!.  By contrast, there is only one way the air
molecules can all be in one half of the room.

Using the bionomial distribution, we see that the mean number of
molecules in each half is 500000, and the standard deviation is 1000,
so the portion of the distribution curve (of the possible numbers of
molecules in my half) that leads to my survival spans the center 200
standard deviations, allowing me to survive
99.999999999999999999999999999999999999...% of the time.  (my tables
don't go that far.)

    For example, in some worlds, you hit 'n' to this article, in others,
    you were injured when your terminal spontaneouly imploded, in others
    you were unable to read the article because it had become garbled by
    quantum noise into (surprise) a perfect translation in Polish, etc.  As
    soon as you take the multiple worlds interpretation seriously, you also
    didn't take it seriously, and so on.  Any rational life, including the
    life of a physicist, becomes absurd under such circumstances.  Because
    of this problem I must reject the multiple worlds interpretation, at
    least along all world lines that happen to allow me rational thought.

True, but in the vast majority of worlds I peacefully read the message.
These possible worlds differ in minor detail; some of the terminal's
atoms moved in different directions, but I couldn't tell the difference.


    _Greg Davidson			Virtual Infinity Systems, San Diego
    ________________________________

-dick