Deflating Hyperspace

[Mark Kohut]

Yes!.......Pynchon is using that incredible aspect of consciousness and the world, the "fact'
  that some" physical reality is created by our consciousness of it".....as it says on the flap copy of a new book I have just speed-read called Quantum Enigma from Oxford....
   
  A friend at Oxford told me about it by saying Pynchon would love it. (This friend is stopped out of Against the Day  with work and life and so on.
   
  Mark

robinlandseadel at comcast.net wrote:
  Multiverses and Blackberries

There be nothing so absurd but that some philosopher 
[or cosmologist? -M.G.] has said it.
-Cicero
Martin Gardner 

(excerpts) 

It all began seriously with an approach to quantum 
mechanics (QM) called "The Many Worlds 
Interpretation" (MWI). In this view, widely defended 
by such eminent physicists as Murray Gell-Mann, 
Stephen Hawking, and Steven Weinberg, at every 
instant when a quantum measurement is made that 
has more than one possible outcome, the number 
specified by what is called the Schrödinger equation, 
the universe splits into two or more universes, each 
corresponding to a possible future. Everything that 
can happen at each juncture happens. Time is no 
longer linear. It is a rapidly branching tree. Obviously 
the number of separate universes increases at a 
prodigious rate.

If all these countless billions of parallel universes 
are taken as no more than abstract mathematical 
entities-worlds that could have formed but didn't-then 
the only "real" world is the one we are in. In this 
interpretation of the MWI the theory becomes little 
more than a new and whimsical language for talking 
about QM. It has the same mathematical formalism, 
makes the same predictions. This is how Hawking 
and many others who favor the MWI interpret it. 
They prefer it because they believe it is a language 
that simplifies QM talk, and also sidesteps many of 
its paradoxes.

There is, however, a more bizarre way to interpret 
the MWI. Those holding what I call the realist view 
actually believe that the endlessly sprouting new 
universes are "out there," in some sort of vast 
super-space-time, just as "real" as the universe we 
know! Of course at every instant a split occurs each 
of us becomes one or more close duplicates, each 
traveling a new universe. We have no awareness of 
this happening because the many universes are not 
causally connected. We simply travel along the 
endless branches of time's monstrous tree in a series 
of universes, never aware that billions upon billions of 
our replicas are springing into existence somewhere 
out there. "When you come to a fork in the road," 
Yogi Berra once said, "take it."


Comments on Martin Gardner's 'multiverses and blackberries'
Follow-Up
Skeptical Inquirer, March, 2002 by Bryce DeWitt

(excerpts)

The chief problem that Everett was trying to resolve 
was that of fuzzy thinking on the part of scores of 
authors, some of them quite prominent, who had 
written incredibly dull papers on how they understood 
quantum mechanics. His "revolutionary" idea was 
simply to assume that quantum mechanics provides 
a description of reality in exactly the same sense 
as classical mechanics was once thought to do. 
The formalism should be allowed to speak for itself. 
Words like splitting or many worlds should not be 
used as substitutes for the mathematical theory, 
and if the words offend then one should choose 
others.


The many worlds interpretation does satisfy Occam's 
principle in the sense that it keeps concepts to a 
minimum, taking the mathematical formalism as it 
stands without adding excess metaphysical baggage 
in the form of "collapsing wave functions" or probabilities 
imposed from outside. The implications of this "bare bones" 
interpretation are admittedly bizarre. But physicists have 
learned over the years that it is almost always rewarding 
to push any formalism (Maxwell's electromagnetic theory,
Einstein's relativity theory, quantum field theory) to its most 
extreme logical conclusions.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_2_26/ai_83585969


"Hamilton's work was later significant in the development 
of quantum mechanics." 

William Rowen Hamilton, an Irish mathematician, 
is known for his discovery of quaternions in 1843. 
see: 



Bekah


 
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