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

[The Avantguardian]

--- Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:

> At 05:54 PM 1/12/2008 -0800, Lee wrote:
> 
> >If it weren't for the "weird correlation", then there would actually
> be
> >four universes---inhabited respectively by the teams A-you & A-him,
> >A-you & B-him, B-you & A-him, and B-you & B-him---
[snip]

> This certainly accords with my own intuition, and I find no 
> principled reason why "entanglement" isn't just an improbable 
> illusion in the MWI. What prevents the "unfortunates" from existing?
> 
> Damien Broderick 

A special relativity thought experiment might help make the
entanglement paradoxes of the Bell inequality a little less "spooky":

Suppose you had, for the sake of argument, a massless observer with a
massless wristwatch and a massless meterstick who always goes at the
speed of light c. In essence let us imagine he is capable of hitching a
ride on the photons involved in the Bell experiment.

Simply applying the Lorentz transformations from a normal "massed"
observer's inertial reference frame to our hypothetical massless
observer's reference frame comoving with one of the photons from the
Bell experiment: Take the limit as v approaches c; gamma or the
squareroot of (1-v^2/c^2) approaches zero. For purposes of determining 
spatial displacement of the x coordinate which runs along the photon's
flight path, one simply multiplies delta x by zero giving zero. In
other words, the Lorentz transforms say that all distances along our
photon jockey's flight path are of zero length. In other words from a
photon's POV, its origin, its destination and every point in between is
the exact same point, even if from our "massed" point of view, the
quasar is billions of light years away from the detector.

This resolves the EPR paradox because from the photon's POV, they
choose their respective polarization angles at the same point in space
no matter how far apart they might seem to us. To us, they are
entangled at an ever increasing distance, to themselves they are
constantly superpositioned in the exact same place along the x
coordinate. Collapsing the polarity function of one, collapses the
polarity of the other that is right there with it and there is no
action at a distance because there is no distance.

It is somewhat less helpful when one tries to find the Lorentz tranform
of the time coordinate from ours to the photon jockey's. One ends up
dividing by zero, meaning that time is "undefined" for a photon's
reference frame. What exactly that means, I am not certain but I
imagine that for a photon, time and causality have no meaning. Time is
dilated to the point of being irrelevant. Everywhere is "here" for a
photon but there is no "now".

In regards to the larger issue, IMO MWI is a convoluted and inelegant
theory. It tempts Ockham's Razor much as Aubrey de Grey's beard tempts
a Gillete. I have many objections to it. For one thing, it violates
conservation of energy. While spontaneous creation of virtual particle
antiparticle pairs does so too, it only does so for very short lengths
of time. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle under Special relativity
says that Delta E * Delta t >= hbar/2.

That is to say that a system only has an energy when it exists long
enough for it settle on a definite frequency. Other universes should
only pop into being "spontaneously" if they are not around long enough
to settle on a definite energy. If they do have a definite energy then
by thermodynamics, that energy has to come from somewhere. The
conservation laws are too heavy price to pay to eliminate observers
from QM.



Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"Life is the sum of all your choices."  
Albert Camus


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