The obvious estimate must rely on branching based around Planck Time,
and distance on Planck Length?
--
Dirk
http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onetribe - Occult Talk Show
> Taking the common interpretation of the Many Worlds Interpretation of
> QM, how are these worlds separated? I assume there must be some
> quasi-spatial distance between branches?
>
> The obvious estimate must rely on branching based around Planck Time,
> and distance on Planck Length?
By definition they are absolutely separated (orthogonal), non-
interacting with each other. In terms of distance it is equivalent to
infinite distance, if you like. Plank distance is too short to prevent
interaction of "worlds".
MWI is a such a speculative construction that excludes all the other
worlds from observations by their definition. One can safely forget
about them.
>The obvious estimate must rely on branching based around Planck Time,
>and distance on Planck Length?
>
No, nothing like that.
--
spinclad
(Roger Hale)
Nah. They are separated in probability space.
How many inches apart are two possible rolls of a pair of dice?
Socks
So what would be the physical geometrical picture - rotation?
So Schrodinger's cats, dead and alive, have no separation except
"probability" space? Which is what, exactly, given that it can hold
entire universes?
That said, the picture still is not one of definite phase rotations.
Let us look at the configurations of one world containing a pair of slits,
light passing through them to an image surface, and the rest of everything
in all its microscopic particularity. We have a means to tell the brightness
of light at a spot on the image surface, whether by eyeball or photocell or
a photochemical reaction. And we either have or have not a means to tell
which slit a particle of light passed through, such as something feeling
a jostle as it passes. (Note, if you will, that 'observation', much less
'consciousness' has no privileged place in this picture. Light falling
on a prebiotic world fulfills these conditions equally well. But I digress.)
A configuration of this world has a photon passing through one slit, left
or right; and a configuration of everything else. If we like, we can
divide this world into a left-passing world, where the photon passed through
the left slit (whether observed to do so or not), and a right-passing world.
In non-separated worlds, as with the unobserved slit passage, there is
a definite phase rotation between the two slit passages, for corresponding
configurations of the rest of the two 'worlds', which could give, say, a
cancellation or boost of the complex value for the two slits at a given spot
over wide ranges of configurations of the rest of the world, and a visible
dark or light fringe at that spot.
In separated worlds, with the slit passage observed, on the contrary, the phase
angles, for the two passages and various configurations of the rest, differ
variously (this is the entanglement of knowing which slit was passed; it shows
up physically in different phase differences between the two slit passages, for
configurations of the rest of everything); the phase differences are 'smeared',
and the amplitude can never be consistently cancelled or boosted independent of
the microscopic state of the rest of the world, and no fringes are to be seen.
So no, the picture is not phase rotation, but phase rotation smear, or
incoherence.
Yours,
spinclad
(Roger Hale)
Really? Seems Zurek invented decoherence theory just for explanation
of the separation of the branches (because MWI does *not* exclude all
by definition) ...