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The most common objection I've heard is that physicists are strongly biased towards 'conservative' laws. And for good reason: Assuming that physical quantities
by twoodfin 11y ago
The most common objection I've heard is that physicists are strongly biased towards 'conservative' laws. And for good reason: Assuming that physical quantities are conserved and then looking for apparent violations of that assumption has been an extremely fruitful theoretical and empirical enterprise.
"Many worlds" suggests the opposite: That physical quantities such as mass are forever increasing, albeit in a way we can't experimentally detect.
- repsilat 11y ago> That physical quantities such as mass are forever increasing I think that's a little uncharitable. In classical terms you could say that each "universe" is associated with some weight or probability, and those probabilities always sum to one. I guess you could say that the "number" of things increases (provided that number is countable and finite, I guess, which seems a bit silly), but the probability-weighted mass of things going on stays the same. Of course, it isn't terribly useful to talk about all of the inaccessible universes taking up the majority of the probability, so we condition on our observations (i.e., we do a Bayesian update, or "collapse the wavefunction".) Then if we talk about "our universe" having probability 1 given our observations, and surmise that people in another parallel, inacessible universe would also say that theirs has probability 1, we might say "Aha! There is now a total of 2, where once there was a total of 1!" It should be clear how this is an error, though.
- tfgg 11y agoEverything is being conserved perfectly well in MW/UWF, since you're just evolving a pure wave function with the Hamiltonian operator, guaranteeing conservation of everything that's meant to be conserved.