4 ms·

Your reference [2] is somewhat suspect. As far as I know, it is not generally accepted in the physics community that the Born rule can be derived directly from

Your reference [2] is somewhat suspect. As far as I know, it is not generally accepted in the physics community that the Born rule can be derived directly from the Schrodinger equation. In fact, it seems generally accepted that such a derivation does not currently exist, and MWI has to stick it in as an additional postulate in some form (or otherwise give an auxiliary argument for it, none of which seem generally accepted either). Further, the author of that paper, Frank Tipler, is a notorious nutjob: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_J._Tipler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_J._Tipler. I don't have time at the moment to review the paper in detail to locate any potential flaws, but I wanted to flag this for others. I think there is substantial reason to be skeptical.

boole1854 4y ago
I agree that Tipler is far off the deep end on on some topics. But you should check out that one paper I linked nevertheless. PNAS is not a junk journal. I also agree there is no consensus that the problem of getting Born's rule from the Schrodinger equation has been solved to everyone's satisfaction.
- spekcular 4y ago
  PNAS publishes a lot of junk. If you're connected to the Academy you can get papers through with very light review. In fact, one can even seen this happened in the Tipler paper: "This Direct Submission article had a prearranged editor." [0] Andrew Gelman calls it a "tabloid": https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2014/06/17/hurricaneshimmicanes-extra-problematic-nature-scientific-publication-process/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2014/06/17/hurricanes.... I will check the paper out though. [0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/no-more-prearranged-editors-pnas https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/no-more-prearrange... Edit: I read the paper. It is borderline crank work. There are decent arguments for the Born rule in MWI but this is not one of them. (I like David Wallace's book, for example.)
  - boole1854 4y ago
    Care to elucidate some critiques of the paper?
    - spekcular 4y ago
      Care to outline a precise argument for me to respond to? I'm honestly not sure one can even be extracted from pages 3 through 5, and I don't want to attack a strawman. One basic problem is that using symmetry arguments to justify the assignment of subjective probabilities (cf. page 4, right column) is going to fail when there isn't a symmetry available, for example for irrational probabilities. A deeper issue is the implicit assumption that one can coarse-grain into discrete "effectively distinguishable universes" for the purpose of doing these counting arguments. There are significant conceptual difficulties doing this, and this claim is much stronger than the bare MWI. Wallace discusses this at length; see for instance the citations in the blog post you responded to.
      - ahazred8ta 4y ago
        Perhaps it occupies the gray area between "wrong" and "not even...". O:-)

boole1854 4y ago

I agree that Tipler is far off the deep end on on some topics. But you should check out that one paper I linked nevertheless. PNAS is not a junk journal. I also agree there is no consensus that the problem of getting Born's rule from the Schrodinger equation has been solved to everyone's satisfaction.

spekcular 4y ago
PNAS publishes a lot of junk. If you're connected to the Academy you can get papers through with very light review. In fact, one can even seen this happened in the Tipler paper: "This Direct Submission article had a prearranged editor." [0] Andrew Gelman calls it a "tabloid": https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2014/06/17/hurricaneshimmicanes-extra-problematic-nature-scientific-publication-process/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2014/06/17/hurricanes.... I will check the paper out though. [0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/no-more-prearranged-editors-pnas https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/no-more-prearrange... Edit: I read the paper. It is borderline crank work. There are decent arguments for the Born rule in MWI but this is not one of them. (I like David Wallace's book, for example.)
- boole1854 4y ago
  Care to elucidate some critiques of the paper?
  - spekcular 4y ago
    Care to outline a precise argument for me to respond to? I'm honestly not sure one can even be extracted from pages 3 through 5, and I don't want to attack a strawman. One basic problem is that using symmetry arguments to justify the assignment of subjective probabilities (cf. page 4, right column) is going to fail when there isn't a symmetry available, for example for irrational probabilities. A deeper issue is the implicit assumption that one can coarse-grain into discrete "effectively distinguishable universes" for the purpose of doing these counting arguments. There are significant conceptual difficulties doing this, and this claim is much stronger than the bare MWI. Wallace discusses this at length; see for instance the citations in the blog post you responded to.
    - ahazred8ta 4y ago
      Perhaps it occupies the gray area between "wrong" and "not even...". O:-)