You shouldn’t take it that seriously. MWI has a lot of zealots in the popular media who act like it’s a proven fact, kind of like some String Theorists do, but it is actually rather dubious.
MWI claims it is simpler because they are getting rid of the Born rule, so it has less assumptions, but the reason there is the Born rule in QM is because… well, it’s needed to actually predict the right results. You can’t just throw it out. It’s also impossible to derive the Born rule without some sort of additional assumption, and there is no agreed upon way to do this.[1]
This makes MWI actually more complicated than traditional quantum mechanics because they have to add different arbitrary assumptions and then add an additional layer of mathematics to derive the Born rule from it, rather than assuming it. These derivations also tend to be incredibly arbitrary because the assumptions you have to make to derive it are always chosen specifically for the purpose of deriving the Born rule and don’t seem to make much sense otherwise, and thus are just as arbitrary as assuming the Born rule directly.[2][3]
If you prefer a video, the one below discusses various “multiverse” ideas including MWI and also discusses how it ultimately ends up being more mathematically complicated than other interpretations of QM.
MWI also makes no sense for a separate reason. If you consider the electromagnetic field for example, how do we know it exists? We know it exists because we can see its effect on particles. If you drop some iron filings around a magnet, it conforms to the shape of a field, but ultimately what you are seeing is the iron filings and not the field itself, but the effects of the field. Now, imagine if someone claimed the iron filings don’t even exist, only the field. You’d be a bit confused because, well, you only know the field exists because of its effects on the filings. You can’t see the field, only the particles, so if you deny the particles, then you’re just left in confusion.
This is effectively what MWI does. We live in a world composed of spacetime containing particles, yet wave functions describe, well, waves made of nothing that exist in an abstract space known as Hilbert space. Schrodinger’s derivation of his famous wave equation is based on observing the behavior of particles. MWI denies particles even exist and everything is just waves in Hilbert space made of nothing, which is very bizarre because then you would be effectively claiming the entire universe is composed of something entirely invisible. So how does that explain everything we see?
[I]t 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
The philosopher Tim Maudlin has a whole lecture you can watch below on this problem, pointing out how MWI makes no sense because nothing in the interpretation includes anything we can actually observe. It quite literally describes a whole universe without observables.
Not to rain on your parade or anything if you are just having fun, but there is a lot of misinformation on websites like YouTube painting MWI as more reasonable than it actually is, so I just want people to be aware.
Thank you!
It’s pretty cool. It contacts a lab in Switzerland to do some quantum stuff and split the universe using the many worlds interpretation
You shouldn’t take it that seriously. MWI has a lot of zealots in the popular media who act like it’s a proven fact, kind of like some String Theorists do, but it is actually rather dubious.
MWI claims it is simpler because they are getting rid of the Born rule, so it has less assumptions, but the reason there is the Born rule in QM is because… well, it’s needed to actually predict the right results. You can’t just throw it out. It’s also impossible to derive the Born rule without some sort of additional assumption, and there is no agreed upon way to do this.[1]
This makes MWI actually more complicated than traditional quantum mechanics because they have to add different arbitrary assumptions and then add an additional layer of mathematics to derive the Born rule from it, rather than assuming it. These derivations also tend to be incredibly arbitrary because the assumptions you have to make to derive it are always chosen specifically for the purpose of deriving the Born rule and don’t seem to make much sense otherwise, and thus are just as arbitrary as assuming the Born rule directly.[2] [3]
If you prefer a video, the one below discusses various “multiverse” ideas including MWI and also discusses how it ultimately ends up being more mathematically complicated than other interpretations of QM.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHa1vbwVaNU
MWI also makes no sense for a separate reason. If you consider the electromagnetic field for example, how do we know it exists? We know it exists because we can see its effect on particles. If you drop some iron filings around a magnet, it conforms to the shape of a field, but ultimately what you are seeing is the iron filings and not the field itself, but the effects of the field. Now, imagine if someone claimed the iron filings don’t even exist, only the field. You’d be a bit confused because, well, you only know the field exists because of its effects on the filings. You can’t see the field, only the particles, so if you deny the particles, then you’re just left in confusion.
This is effectively what MWI does. We live in a world composed of spacetime containing particles, yet wave functions describe, well, waves made of nothing that exist in an abstract space known as Hilbert space. Schrodinger’s derivation of his famous wave equation is based on observing the behavior of particles. MWI denies particles even exist and everything is just waves in Hilbert space made of nothing, which is very bizarre because then you would be effectively claiming the entire universe is composed of something entirely invisible. So how does that explain everything we see?
The philosopher Tim Maudlin has a whole lecture you can watch below on this problem, pointing out how MWI makes no sense because nothing in the interpretation includes anything we can actually observe. It quite literally describes a whole universe without observables.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us7gbWWPUsA
Not to rain on your parade or anything if you are just having fun, but there is a lot of misinformation on websites like YouTube painting MWI as more reasonable than it actually is, so I just want people to be aware.
Interesting read. :)