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The trouble is physicists who work in foundational QM who still utters phrases like "But the vista of all these parallel histories is deeply unsettling, and lik

The trouble is physicists who work in foundational QM who still utters phrases like "But the vista of all these parallel histories is deeply unsettling, and like many other physicists I would prefer a single history." and then they get dragged down into complicated alternative frameworks instead of the simple one they don't like. Einstein wasn't and will not be the only one to go down that path. Over and over again it has been shown you need to calculate all the possible histories to arrive at the probability of a specific history to be realized. And if you need to calculate those histories to match the universe, chances are high the universe as well has to calculate them.

perl4ever 6y ago
On the other hand, certain people like to say that quantum computing is not about simply computing every possible result of something in parallel universes, that you can't do that much better than with classical computing. If that's so, doesn't it imply in some vague way that any parallel dimension is something less than completely real?
- jacb 6y ago
  Perhaps it's consistent with computation being done in many "parallel universes," but with heavily restricted communication - in this model it's almost trivial to parallelize work (flip a quantum coin, do A if heads else B), what's tough is making sure that you don't get parallelized along with the work (i.e. that you don't become entangled with the computation) and making sure there's a way to accumulate the parallel computation into something that's singly-readable and useful.