I wrote about this idea on Lemmy before and I got downvoted for it.
Science Memes
Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules
- Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
- Keep it rooted (on topic).
- No spam.
- Infographics welcome, get schooled.
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Research Committee
Other Mander Communities
Science and Research
Biology and Life Sciences
- !abiogenesis@mander.xyz
- !animal-behavior@mander.xyz
- !anthropology@mander.xyz
- !arachnology@mander.xyz
- !balconygardening@slrpnk.net
- !biodiversity@mander.xyz
- !biology@mander.xyz
- !biophysics@mander.xyz
- !botany@mander.xyz
- !ecology@mander.xyz
- !entomology@mander.xyz
- !fermentation@mander.xyz
- !herpetology@mander.xyz
- !houseplants@mander.xyz
- !medicine@mander.xyz
- !microscopy@mander.xyz
- !mycology@mander.xyz
- !nudibranchs@mander.xyz
- !nutrition@mander.xyz
- !palaeoecology@mander.xyz
- !palaeontology@mander.xyz
- !photosynthesis@mander.xyz
- !plantid@mander.xyz
- !plants@mander.xyz
- !reptiles and amphibians@mander.xyz
Physical Sciences
- !astronomy@mander.xyz
- !chemistry@mander.xyz
- !earthscience@mander.xyz
- !geography@mander.xyz
- !geospatial@mander.xyz
- !nuclear@mander.xyz
- !physics@mander.xyz
- !quantum-computing@mander.xyz
- !spectroscopy@mander.xyz
Humanities and Social Sciences
Practical and Applied Sciences
- !exercise-and sports-science@mander.xyz
- !gardening@mander.xyz
- !self sufficiency@mander.xyz
- !soilscience@slrpnk.net
- !terrariums@mander.xyz
- !timelapse@mander.xyz
Memes
Miscellaneous
That's because you were looking for the upvotes.
It's right there on the study. If you had been troll-posting looking for the downvote lulz, you would have gotten the reverse. The reverse of. The reverse of the thing of the thing of the reverse of.
I was not looking for anything. So I found everything of nothing.
I was not looking for not something
and then I found everything of nothing
and heaven knows I'm miserable now
Goddamnit Sarah Conner!
Fate is predetermined by physics!
I'm going to ruin the joke by explaining that it makes you do shit, then "responds" to itm
What does it mean?
When this baby hits 88mph, we’re gonna see some serious shit.
Quantum realm particles seem to know the future or interact with their past.
Also touching them effects measurement, fucking sophons
Sounds like it's just trying to mix up words to make normal cause and effect sound like spooky action at a distance.
Words are a bad medium for conveying truth about reality. Or anything, really.
SCIENTISTS PROVE SPEAKING WILL KILL YOU!
Fus Ro Dah?
Yes!
Ahhh, I see, thank you!
Yet again, much smarter than your username implies!
It's a ruse to let me call people dumbass's and get away with it, and I'm also a dumbass.
We are all dumbasses in one way or another
Yeah we are, ya dumbass.
Pretty sure some slopmaster asked an AI chatbot to make a catchy headline for the quantum mechanics we've known for years.
You have a quantum cat-in-a-box. The cat is in a superposition of being alive and dead. You make the "human choice" to open the box. Now the cat turns out to be dead, and it actually died 10 minutes before you open the box. So you can kind of interpret it as your choice affecting reality 10 minutes backwards.
See, this is why I prefer the (terribly named) "Many Worlds" interpretation. Unlike the Copenhagen interpretation, it does not privilege measurement over other types of interactions between systems. That is, the wave function never collapses, it only seems to because you, as the observer, are part of the system.
The easy way to see this is to imagine that you put some other experimenter inside of a box. When they perform a measurement, from your perspective the wave function has not yet collapsed, but from the experimenter's perspective the wave has collapsed. Essentially, it is as if the system in a box has branched so that there are multiple copies of the experimenter within, one who sees each possible measurement result, but because you are outside of it you could, in theory, reverse the measurement and unite the two branches. However, it is important to understand that the concept of branches is just a visualization; it is nothing inherent to the theory, and when things get even slightly more complicated than the situation I have described, they do not meaningfully exist at all.
(Also, if it seems implausible that a macroscopic system in a box could remain in a superposition of multiple states, you actually are not wrong! However, the reason is not theoretical but practical: any system inside the box will interact thermally with the box itself, so unless it is perfectly insulated you cannot help but interact with it and therefore measure it yourself. This keeps going until essentially the entire world cannot help but perform a measurement of your system. Preventing this tendency from screwing things up is one of the things that makes building quantum computers hard.)
The Many Worlds interpretation is rather unconvincing to me for many reasons.
|1| It claims it is "simpler" just by dropping the Born rule, but it is mathematically impossible to derive the Born rule from the Schrodinger equation alone. You must include some additional assumption to derive it, and so it ends up necessarily having to introduce an additional postulate at some point to derive the Born rule from. Its number of assumptions thus always equal that of any other interpretation but with additional mathematical complexity caused by the derivation.
|2| It claims to be "local" because there is no nonlocal wavefunction collapse. But the EPR paper already proves it's mathematically impossible for something to match the predictions of quantum theory and be causally local if there are no hidden variables. This is obscured by the fact that MWI proponents like to claim the Born rule probabilities are a subjective illusion and not physically real, but illusions still have a physical cause that need to be physically explained, and any explanation you give must reproduce Born rule probabilities, and thus must violate causal locality. Some MWI proponents try to get around this by redefining locality in terms of relativistic locality, but even Copenhagen is local in that sense, so you end up with no benefits over Copenhagen if you accept that redefinition.
|3| It relies on belief that there exists an additional mathematical entity Ψ as opposed to just ψ, but there exists no mathematical definition or derivation of this entity. Even Everett agreed that all the little ψ we work with in quantum theory are relative states, but then he proposes that there exists an absolute universal Ψ, but to me this makes about as much sense as claiming there exists a universal velocity in Galilean relativity. There is no way to combine relative velocities to give you a universal velocity, they are just fundamentally relative. Similarly, wavefunctions in quantum mechanics are fundamentally relative. A universal wavefunction does not meaningfully exist.
|4| You describe MWI as kind of a copying of the world into different branches where different observers see different outcomes of the experiment, but that is not what MWI actually claims. MWI claims the Born rule is a subjective illusion and all that exists is the Schrodinger equation, but the Schrodinger equation never branches. If, for example, a photon hits a beam splitter with a 50% chance of passing through and a 50% chance of being reflected and you have a detector on either side, the Schrodinger equation will never evolve into a state that looks anything like it having past through or it having been reflected, nor will it ever evolve into a state that looks anything like it having past through and it having been reflected. The state it evolves into is entirely disconnected from the discrete states we actually observe except through the Born rule. Indeed, even those probabilities I gave you come from the Born rule.
This was something Einstein pointed out in relation to atomic decay, that no matter how long you evolve the Schrodinger equation, it never evolves into a state that looks anything like decay vs non-decay. You never get to a state that looks like either or, both, or neither. You end up with something entirely unrecognizable from what we would actually observe in an experiment, only connected back to the probabilities of decay vs non-decay by the Born rule. If the universe really is just the Schrodinger equation, you simply cannot say that it branches into two "worlds" where in one you see one outcome and in another you see a different outcome, because the Schrodinger equation never gives you that. You would have to claim that the entire world consists of a single evolving infinite-dimensional universal wavefunction that is nothing akin to anything we have ever observed before.
There is a good lecture below by Maudlin on this problem, that MWI presents a theory which has no connection to observable reality because nothing within the theory contains any observables.
Rovelli also comments on it:
The gigantic, universal ψ wave that contains all the possible worlds is like Hegel’s dark night in which all cows are black: it does not account, per se, for the phenomenological reality that we actually observe. In order to describe the phenomena that we observe, other mathematical elements are needed besides ψ: the individual variables, like X and P, that we use to describe the world. The Many Worlds interpretation does not explain them clearly. It is not enough to know the ψ wave and Schrödinger’s equation in order to define and use quantum theory: we need to specify an algebra of observables, otherwise we cannot calculate anything and there is no relation with the phenomena of our experience. The role of this algebra of observables, which is extremely clear in other interpretations, is not at all clear in the Many Worlds interpretation.
— Carlo Rovelli, “Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution”
-
First, working in terms of decoherence is significantly simpler than worrying about whether something has been measured or not at every single step of the evolution of a system, because I have observed that when people do the latter they tend to get headaches contemplating the meaning of the "quantum eraser" when there is no need to. Second, you actually can observe Born's rule in action by modeling the evolution of a system with an experimenter performing measurements and watching it emerge from the calculation.
-
The only way that the two sides of the EPR pair know that they agree or disagree is by communicating with each other and comparing results, which can only happen through local interactions.
-
I have no idea what you even mean by this. What makes the (terribly named) Many Worlds Interpretation nice is precisely that you can just treat everything as a wave function, with parts that might be entangled in ways you don't know about (i.e., decoherence, modeled via density matrices).
-
The fact that you are even making this claim is why I have trouble taking the rest of your comment seriously at all, because I specifically said, "However, it is important to understand that the concept of branches is just a visualization; it is nothing inherent to the theory, and when things get even slightly more complicated than the situation I have described, they do not meaningfully exist at all."
So you're saying there's a world where Bernie Sanders won in 2016, trump died of covid without the presidential medical suite, americans have universal healthcare, rent control, net neutrality, and free tuition, citizen's united was repealed, the US never pulled out of international treaties, russia never invaded Ukraine, the latest iteration of the Israel-Palestine conflict never kicked off, the Taliban never took back control of the Afghan government, the resurgence of white supremacy and militant nationalism never took off, criminal justice systems were reformed into data-driven, prevention-first, community-centric public safety models, social and mental health services are fully-funded and effective addiction treatment strategies implemented, reducing demand for the illicit drug market and financially starving out violent criminal syndicates, victimless crimes were decriminalized and regulated for harm-prevention and reduction, nations actually kept their commitments towards climate action and reduced warming to below the target of 2° (possibly even below 1.5°), financial oligarchy was stopped in its tracks, billionaires and corporations are taxed at a fair rate, world hunger has been abolished, and we're all well on our way towards world peace and prosperity?
Sounds like he is reading too much into the observer effect and now has been reclassified himself as an astrologer.
If later you realize that you did have time, you will have already read and understood it
Professor, we're not sending information back in time, we're just rearranging the structure of the multiverse!
I'm intelligent, but not nearly intelligent enough for whatever this is...
Is this just another way of talking about the Teleological framework of time (like the heptapods in Arrival)?
I think it has something to do with a philosophical argument I read almost 2 decades ago.
It went something along the lines of; we create new physics the more we study and understand it. Like a rendering fractal, the closer you look the more complex it becomes.
That reminds me of the bit from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the moment anyone actually understands the universe the whole thing disappears and is replaced with something even bigger, weirder, and more confusing.
Mystical thinking is a great excuse for being too stupid to unravel the secrets of universal field theory like a dummy
Halfway to a great comment there but it fizzled out a bit
I'm way too high for this shit.
Or not high enough.
So, a new Copenhagen interpretation? 🤔
life in the suck zone.
Life is literally so easy once you understand this one trick.
Damn I'm way too tired to dig into this now but it sounds worth a day of rabbit hole-ing