[ExI] Many Worlds (was: A Simulation Argument)

[Damien Broderick]

At 01:29 PM 1/13/2008 -0500,  John K Clark wrote:

> >  I find no principled reason why "entanglement"
> > isn't just an improbable illusion in the MWI.
>
>But entanglement always works this way.

Indeed it does, and for the reason Lee mentioned this fact seems 
incompatible with MWI (although Lee actually disagrees about this, I think).

>I think it unlikely that you just
>happen to be living in a universe where the astronomically unlikely always
>happens and the likely never does.

Not at all astronomically unlikely. If an event can happen 4 ways in 
MW, but QT says 2, and we only ever observe 2, it's unlikely that MWI 
is the explanation.

>And I think the word "illusion" really
>doesn't explain much.

What I meant was something along the lines of the standard 
reinterpretation of tachyons (if they existed) to explain away their 
apparent temporal reverse trajectory; no, it's just that another 
forward-in-time particle randomly enters your frame "from infinity" 
and coincidentally slams into the detector at just the right instant 
to give the impression of a superluminal impact (Bilaniuk et al).* 
Thus, any apparent evidence for tachyons is just an illusion. No 
matter how unlikely, in that case.

Damien Broderick

*I see Wikipedia talks about this:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon>

<Tachyons are prevented from violating causality by the Feinberg 
reinterpretation principle  which states that a negative-energy 
tachyon sent back in time in an attempt to violate causality can 
always be reinterpreted as a positive-energy tachyon travelling 
forward in time. This is because observers cannot distinguish between 
the emission and absorption of tachyons. For a tachyon there is no 
distinction between the processes of emission and absorption, since 
there always exists a sub-light velocity 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_frame>reference frame shift 
that alters the temporal direction of the tachyon's world-line, which 
is not true for <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradyon>bradyons or photons. >