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Over the past year I've developed a good grasp on the modern consensus, by reading everything I can find that might shed light on the subject and lurking on phy

Over the past year I've developed a good grasp on the modern consensus, by reading everything I can find that might shed light on the subject and lurking on physicsforums.com. Despite the common physicist trait of shying away from philosophy, there is a general acceptance that decoherence can lead to an effective collapse, which reproduces our classical world (and many others). Some arguments deriving the Born rule may be circular; I don't know - I don't see how that matters - because others are not. There are some critics but they mostly start from philosophical considerations: that a multiverse is untestable outside the quantum scale, imposes a high cognitive burden or requires us to redefine probability. Those objections are only valid if you consider a multiverse a priori unlikely; the evidence and math is clearly in it's favour. If you want better answers I would look through that forum, or consult a recent review of the literature around decoherence.

iaw 10y ago
Reading up on decoherence, the phenomenon itself doesn't lead to a many worlds hypothesis but allows for the conjecture of many worlds. Information becoming immeasurable/irretrievable is not proof in and of itself of a multiverse. I have some modest undergraduate work in modern Physics, I think you may be taking the dominant voice on the physicsforums.com at face value when there's a high potential for self-selection bias in online forums. Going back to the experiment evidence and underlying mathematics there just hasn't been a breakthrough of any sorts.
- akvadrako 10y ago
  The point is more that there is no need for a breakthrough, because there is no need to postulate a mechanism for actual collapse, since decoherence is sufficient to explain the results of experiments. I'm not sure what your argument is, but nobody is proving a multiverse, it's just an observation.

iaw 10y ago

Reading up on decoherence, the phenomenon itself doesn't lead to a many worlds hypothesis but allows for the conjecture of many worlds. Information becoming immeasurable/irretrievable is not proof in and of itself of a multiverse. I have some modest undergraduate work in modern Physics, I think you may be taking the dominant voice on the physicsforums.com at face value when there's a high potential for self-selection bias in online forums. Going back to the experiment evidence and underlying mathematics there just hasn't been a breakthrough of any sorts.

akvadrako 10y ago
The point is more that there is no need for a breakthrough, because there is no need to postulate a mechanism for actual collapse, since decoherence is sufficient to explain the results of experiments. I'm not sure what your argument is, but nobody is proving a multiverse, it's just an observation.