First: The Born probabilities. That is where all the predictive power of quantum theory is located. If you don’t have those, you just have a qualitative world-picture, one of many possibilities.
Second: There is no continuity of identity in time of a world, as I suppose we shall see in the Julian Barbour instalment; nothing to relate the worlds extracted from the wavefunction in one moment to those extracted in the next, nothing to say ‘this world is the continuation of that one’. The denial of continuity in time is a radical step and should be recognized as such.
Third: If you favor the position basis, then as things stand, you have to talk about instantaneous spacelike states of the whole universe, i.e. there is a conceptually (though not dynamically) special reference frame. You are free to say ‘maybe we can do it differently, in a way that’s more relativistic’, but for now that’s just a hope.
For all these reasons, many worlds is not obviously the leading contender.
False for three reasons.
First: The Born probabilities. That is where all the predictive power of quantum theory is located. If you don’t have those, you just have a qualitative world-picture, one of many possibilities.
Second: There is no continuity of identity in time of a world, as I suppose we shall see in the Julian Barbour instalment; nothing to relate the worlds extracted from the wavefunction in one moment to those extracted in the next, nothing to say ‘this world is the continuation of that one’. The denial of continuity in time is a radical step and should be recognized as such.
Third: If you favor the position basis, then as things stand, you have to talk about instantaneous spacelike states of the whole universe, i.e. there is a conceptually (though not dynamically) special reference frame. You are free to say ‘maybe we can do it differently, in a way that’s more relativistic’, but for now that’s just a hope.
For all these reasons, many worlds is not obviously the leading contender.