News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Experiments Spell Doom for Decades-Old Explanation of Qua... by im3w1l on Friday October 21, 2022 @09:21AM (#33287718)
We can detect their presence because they cause interference with our own.
Re:Experiments Spell Doom for Decades-Old Explanation of Qua... by naasking on Friday October 21, 2022 @10:49AM (#33288564)
Circular. You have to already accept many worlds to take this as evidence of worlds. You can argue for Many-Worlds on grounds of parsimony and clarity, but that's it.
Re:Experiments Spell Doom for Decades-Old Explanation of Qua... by im3w1l on Friday October 21, 2022 @12:50PM (#33290201)
No I don't think so. Many worlds is basically the hypothesis that we can put arbitrarily large systems in superposition. Like schroedingers cat that is both dead and alive, but instead it could be the whole lab, the whole planet, the whole galaxy that is simultaneously in two different states. We could test this by trying to actually do it, by putting really large and complex systems in superposition. If they both evolve as we'd predict and cause the interference patterns we predict, then we must conclude that these "other-labs", "other-planets", "other-galaxies", "other-worlds" evolve just like ours, and have a causal effect on ours.

Saying that sure, they evolve like ours, and sure they affect ours, but even so they are not real - that is I suppose one stance, but then you are getting pretty close to solipsism.

Re:Experiments Spell Doom for Decades-Old Explanation of Qua... by naasking on Friday October 21, 2022 @01:05PM (#33290410)
> Saying that sure, they evolve like ours, and sure they effect ours, but even so they are not real - that is I suppose one stance, but then you are getting pretty close to solipsism.

No, you'd get something like Bohmian mechanics, or Rovelli's relational interpretation. Which is my point: you can only take this as evidence of other worlds if you basically smuggle those assumptions in.

Re:Experiments Spell Doom for Decades-Old Explanation of Qua... by criddell on Friday October 21, 2022 @02:43PM (#33291595)
> We could test this by trying to actually do it, by putting really large and complex systems in superposition.

Is there any hope that one could actually do this? The article mentions that large systems may be self-observing (via gravity).

Re:Experiments Spell Doom for Decades-Old Explanation of Qua... by GoblinSlayer on Friday October 21, 2022 @05:06PM (#33293043)
I thought there's a quasi-classical approximation of quantum gravity, it doesn't work only for event horizon due to infinities there, but should work fine for diffuse matter, like how most calculations for electron orbitals use classical electromagnetic field.