vanesch,
Well, that's what I came here to ask you guys who know more about this stuff. Are natural processes similar enough (in other ways than energy) to what happens to the LHC, that we can say that if this specific thing happens in the LHC, it happens in nature? (In your light bulb example...
I really would like to have a more 100% definitive argument than "it's speculative". Perhaps something along the lines of, "if you can create universes by slamming stuff together to create magnetic monopoles, and then slamming stuff into those monopoles, then we we know it happens 10^many times...
Do any of you happen to know whether there's a nonzero (or greater than let's say one in a million) chance of accidental universe creation at LHC, as is sort of suggested here: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19125591.500-create-your-own-universe.html ? If there is, then does...
Here's a new(?) explanation of the experiment: http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/Nonlocal_2007.pdf
OGP: I don't know, I might, but I'm reluctant to say something amounting to "prove your experiment for sure won't blow up the world" without a good idea what I'm talking about. I'd still be...
So does anyone else think "Carlo Rovelli" is secretly Karl Rove with a wig? I think he's trying to destroy string theory as part of the Republican War on Science. That sneaky bastard.
Do you agree that the empty branches in Bohmian mechanics contain brains? If not, do you agree that they contain things that are exactly isomorphic to brains even if they're ultimately made out of different stuff? Why couldn't those things be us?
The crucial difference here being that in the former theory, 1 is explained by 2 and 3, whereas in the latter theory, 1 is an assumption that comes from nowhere. Occam is bothered by complex assumptions, not complex conclusions. Once you've explained something, you can cross it off your list of...
I don't think you (as an "interpretation designer") get to specify what's a material object and what isn't; it should follow from what you've already assumed. If Everett branches are material, then empty Bohm branches are also material for the same reason, no matter whether we call them...
OK, yes, in that sense, there are no photons in the empty branches. But the empty branches still have structures in them that look exactly like humans doing observations. How do you know those structures aren't us? After all, MWI is just Bohm without the particles (and some other stuff). If...
I don't know... it's easy to specify a wavefunction; you just write down some equations, and then without any complex further assumptions, you can talk about decoherence and so on to show that humans and their experiments are structures in the wavefunction. But how do you specify the collection...
Would you say that Bohmian mechanics requires a nonstandard philosophy of mind? The way I see it, an observer observes something when that something engages in some sort of causal process that creates changes in his brain, like photons striking the eye which then sends further signals, etc. Do...
I disagree. A wavefunction is a much simpler thing than the collection of all humans and their experiments. Occam would tell you to derive the latter from the former (as in MWI) rather than somehow taking it as given.
But as you just admitted in the other thread, even though they may not "count", Bohm has all those branches too! Anyway, if a hypothesis isn't testable, that's not a reason to think it's false, just that future observations won't prove it true. Hypotheses that pass tests get bonus points...
IANAST (I am not a string theorist), but from what I've heard, different braneworlds in the same 11D space can affect each other via gravity, so I'd expect the answer is yes. Not sure, though.