If this hypothesis (“99% of universes get destroyed every microsecond, but we don’t notice because of anthropic principle”) would be true, the question is what exactly are those universe-destroying events, and whether something can increase or decrease their probability.
Because if the probability of the universe-destroying event depends on some factor X, then we couldn’t observe the destruction of universe per se, but we could imagine statistically weird behavior of X. For example, if we flip a coin, and the outcome of head means that universe gets destroyed with 99% probability, but the outcome of tails means that universe gets destroyed with 99.9% probability, from our point of view it would seem like an imbalanced coin where the head falls about ten times more likely than tails.
Problem is, we wouldn’t necessarily perceive this as “statistically weird”, but rather as completely normal, because that’s how it always was. From our point of view, it would be just another law of physics: “If you flip a coin, the outcome is head ten times more likely than tails; that’s how the coins behave, duh”.
So maybe at this moment we could start suspecting any fact about our universe, or any law of physics, as a statistical artifact of the “fragile universe hypothesis”.
Something like: “Why do neutrinos have such a small mass?” “Maybe there is a reason why the mass has to be non-zero, but maybe also more massive neutrinos generate universe-destroying events more frequently, which is why we find ourselves in a universe with neutrinos having small mass.”
Or: “Why is universe expanding?” “Each collision of particles has a non-zero probability of generating a universe-destroying event, and this is why we are more likely to find ourselves in a universe where the frequency of collisions is decreasing; i.e. an explanding universe.”
This is exactly the suspicion I have. The “real” physical laws could be quite different from the “experienced” physical laws. If this idea is correct physicists are only getting a small piece of the story of how the universe really operates.
It seems to me that this sort of behavior could (with sufficient refinement) provide an account for some of the more bizarre aspects of physical law. An obvious target is the counterintuitive statistics that make quantum mechanics so spooky.
It would also be place where physicsists could stuff their physics—extra degrees of freedom to explain the regularities we observe in nature. Perhaps instead of tiny curled dimensions of string theory we can stuff some of that physics into the details of a sort of subatomic brinksmanship.
(sometimes I wonder [not too seriously] if this could explain why certain things aren’t—why we don’t see dark matter, or where there are no free quarks or magnetic monopoles—maybe when they crop up the world as we know it ceases to be)
A pernicious difficulty is tying our experience of probability to what is actually going on. Ultimately some sort of self-selection accounting must occur. This is where we come up against sleeping beauty type problems and need to question some strongly held intuitions.
And that’s where I start getting confused (not that there aren’t other confusing aspects to this)!
I generally take that confusion to be a good sign. If there wasn’t some dangerous conceptual waters everyone would wade in. What I don’t see any real no go as to why the universe couldn’t be this way.
An obvious target is the counterintuitive statistics that make quantum mechanics so spooky.
Please don’t go this way, this is an obvious dead end. Trying to explain something you don’t understand by proposing even weirder hypothesis with completely unpredictable consequences… yeah, it’s tempting, but you could equally say that “maybe magic is real… and that would explain the double-slit experiment”. It kinda would, but only because it could explain literally everything.
I get the sort of unrestrained woolly thinking that comes from a diet of too much insight porn and an overtrusting one’s own ideas. Let me assure you that I don’t particularly trust my suspicion here. My aim is to see if it is a good idea or not and if it is a good idea see how far it goes. I figure if someone can provide an extremely compelling argument as to why it’s not true then that itself would probably be pretty interesting!
On the subject of quantum mechanics my intent is not to explain a mystery with another mystery fill it with secret sauce and revel in the mysticism. I detest such a thing. Since my idea rests on a specific properties of the “true” interpretation of quantum mechanics (one where our experience of time branches) I sort of view partaking in that fight as a necessary endeavour.
My imediate aim is much more focused. I’m specifically referring to the counterintuitive nature of probability in situations like Bell’s theorem. There is a strong link in mathematical structure between Bell’s and conditional probability which has its own famous counterintuitive probability puzzle (The Monty Hall Porblem). I believe the possibility of universe destroying events can exhibit the same sort counterintuitive subjective experiences. However I have yet to really flesh it out in a more rigorous way.
I apologize if that last paragraph comes off a bit as word salad. Part of why it’s hard to explain is because probability in a branching-time scenario is sort of an illusion. In MWI a quantum coin flip both heads and tails are actually observed. The perception of a 50⁄50 chance is “merely” a subjective experience. Which means you have to be very deliberate about what you’re talking about; it gets tricky to talk clearly about it.
Anyways what excites me more is when you said “please don’t go this way” you sort of imply that there’s another way that you find to be better. I’d really like to know your thoughts as to where you’d like to see it go. I fully expect to go down paths where completely reasonable people will ask “what the hell is that dude thinking? and I fully expect to sometimes ask myself later “what the hell was I thinking?”
“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”—Groucho Marx
Well, if you get some mathematics explaining why universe destruction results in exactly the numbers known from quantum physics, then maybe it gets interested.
Sorry, I have no specific path to follow, other than to first study quantum physics on its own (all the equations with the complex numbers etc.) before inventing your own theory of why it is what it is. First get to know what, then speculate about why. Otherwise you are at risk of getting quantum physics wrong, and then inventing reasons for your wrong understanding of the quantum physics, which is a lose/lose situation (either you can’t find a good explanation, or you succeed to find an “explanation” for something that is actually not true). If you get familiar with the standard university-level quantum physics, then your hypotheses get the chance to be actually useful.
Making a wrong hypothesis is the inevitable risk, but seeing people waste energy inventing explanations for something that is not true, that’s quite sad. (I am now thinking on one long lecture I attended at Mensa, where a guy “disproved theory of relativity” by proposing a theory that was obviously wrong for trivial reasons; it actually predicted that particles would move quite differently parallel to some absolute space axes x,y,z than diagonally. Since there are no obvious “straight” and “diagonal” directions in our universe, his hypothesis was completely wrong regardless of whether Einstein was right or wrong about some technical detail.)
So yeah. the gold standard is. of course. scientific prediction. My idea is very far away from such a thing! I actually do have some background in quantum mechanics (I have a physics minor :P) and at one point actually did have some understanding of Hamiltonian Operators and eigenstates and bra-ket notation. However that’s a far cry from the sort of needed mathematics to really understand the implications of what I’m talking about (this is why they say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing)! What I do have is enough knowledge to tentatively pose that my idea doesn’t contradict what we’ve actually seen in experiments (so I don’t think it’s trivially wrong).
I’m not too worried about proposing a possible explanation first then asking what it can explain. That may seem like a backwards way of doing things, but it might be a way to approach problems from a different angle. My guess is (having not read much scientific biography it’s hard to say) there were probably some scientists who developed the key ideas of their breakthroughs prior to completing formal training in their field. Besides, it’s a lot more effort for me to learn all this stuff then to just ask the question on on Internet forum!
I’m also not worried about becoming that Mensan. That dude put too much emotional stakes into being right about that. He is completely emotionally invested in the correctness of his idea and his own brilliance over Einstein. I’m keenly aware of the fact that I’m just some dude throwing some half-baked idea onto an Internet forum. I’m not at all worried if people think it’s crazy or wrong. And I’m not worried if it is wrong! What worries me more is if people don’t think it’s worth the time of day or is completely uninteresting. That would make me sad but not hugely sad, just kinda sorta sad. My contention is merely the idea is interesting enough to take somewhat seriously.
If this hypothesis (“99% of universes get destroyed every microsecond, but we don’t notice because of anthropic principle”) would be true, the question is what exactly are those universe-destroying events, and whether something can increase or decrease their probability.
Because if the probability of the universe-destroying event depends on some factor X, then we couldn’t observe the destruction of universe per se, but we could imagine statistically weird behavior of X. For example, if we flip a coin, and the outcome of head means that universe gets destroyed with 99% probability, but the outcome of tails means that universe gets destroyed with 99.9% probability, from our point of view it would seem like an imbalanced coin where the head falls about ten times more likely than tails.
Problem is, we wouldn’t necessarily perceive this as “statistically weird”, but rather as completely normal, because that’s how it always was. From our point of view, it would be just another law of physics: “If you flip a coin, the outcome is head ten times more likely than tails; that’s how the coins behave, duh”.
So maybe at this moment we could start suspecting any fact about our universe, or any law of physics, as a statistical artifact of the “fragile universe hypothesis”.
Something like: “Why do neutrinos have such a small mass?” “Maybe there is a reason why the mass has to be non-zero, but maybe also more massive neutrinos generate universe-destroying events more frequently, which is why we find ourselves in a universe with neutrinos having small mass.”
Or: “Why is universe expanding?” “Each collision of particles has a non-zero probability of generating a universe-destroying event, and this is why we are more likely to find ourselves in a universe where the frequency of collisions is decreasing; i.e. an explanding universe.”
This is exactly the suspicion I have. The “real” physical laws could be quite different from the “experienced” physical laws. If this idea is correct physicists are only getting a small piece of the story of how the universe really operates.
It seems to me that this sort of behavior could (with sufficient refinement) provide an account for some of the more bizarre aspects of physical law. An obvious target is the counterintuitive statistics that make quantum mechanics so spooky.
It would also be place where physicsists could stuff their physics—extra degrees of freedom to explain the regularities we observe in nature. Perhaps instead of tiny curled dimensions of string theory we can stuff some of that physics into the details of a sort of subatomic brinksmanship.
(sometimes I wonder [not too seriously] if this could explain why certain things aren’t—why we don’t see dark matter, or where there are no free quarks or magnetic monopoles—maybe when they crop up the world as we know it ceases to be)
A pernicious difficulty is tying our experience of probability to what is actually going on. Ultimately some sort of self-selection accounting must occur. This is where we come up against sleeping beauty type problems and need to question some strongly held intuitions.
And that’s where I start getting confused (not that there aren’t other confusing aspects to this)!
I generally take that confusion to be a good sign. If there wasn’t some dangerous conceptual waters everyone would wade in. What I don’t see any real no go as to why the universe couldn’t be this way.
Please don’t go this way, this is an obvious dead end. Trying to explain something you don’t understand by proposing even weirder hypothesis with completely unpredictable consequences… yeah, it’s tempting, but you could equally say that “maybe magic is real… and that would explain the double-slit experiment”. It kinda would, but only because it could explain literally everything.
I get the sort of unrestrained woolly thinking that comes from a diet of too much insight porn and an overtrusting one’s own ideas. Let me assure you that I don’t particularly trust my suspicion here. My aim is to see if it is a good idea or not and if it is a good idea see how far it goes. I figure if someone can provide an extremely compelling argument as to why it’s not true then that itself would probably be pretty interesting!
On the subject of quantum mechanics my intent is not to explain a mystery with another mystery fill it with secret sauce and revel in the mysticism. I detest such a thing. Since my idea rests on a specific properties of the “true” interpretation of quantum mechanics (one where our experience of time branches) I sort of view partaking in that fight as a necessary endeavour.
My imediate aim is much more focused. I’m specifically referring to the counterintuitive nature of probability in situations like Bell’s theorem. There is a strong link in mathematical structure between Bell’s and conditional probability which has its own famous counterintuitive probability puzzle (The Monty Hall Porblem). I believe the possibility of universe destroying events can exhibit the same sort counterintuitive subjective experiences. However I have yet to really flesh it out in a more rigorous way.
I apologize if that last paragraph comes off a bit as word salad. Part of why it’s hard to explain is because probability in a branching-time scenario is sort of an illusion. In MWI a quantum coin flip both heads and tails are actually observed. The perception of a 50⁄50 chance is “merely” a subjective experience. Which means you have to be very deliberate about what you’re talking about; it gets tricky to talk clearly about it.
Anyways what excites me more is when you said “please don’t go this way” you sort of imply that there’s another way that you find to be better. I’d really like to know your thoughts as to where you’d like to see it go. I fully expect to go down paths where completely reasonable people will ask “what the hell is that dude thinking? and I fully expect to sometimes ask myself later “what the hell was I thinking?”
“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”—Groucho Marx
Well, if you get some mathematics explaining why universe destruction results in exactly the numbers known from quantum physics, then maybe it gets interested.
Sorry, I have no specific path to follow, other than to first study quantum physics on its own (all the equations with the complex numbers etc.) before inventing your own theory of why it is what it is. First get to know what, then speculate about why. Otherwise you are at risk of getting quantum physics wrong, and then inventing reasons for your wrong understanding of the quantum physics, which is a lose/lose situation (either you can’t find a good explanation, or you succeed to find an “explanation” for something that is actually not true). If you get familiar with the standard university-level quantum physics, then your hypotheses get the chance to be actually useful.
Making a wrong hypothesis is the inevitable risk, but seeing people waste energy inventing explanations for something that is not true, that’s quite sad. (I am now thinking on one long lecture I attended at Mensa, where a guy “disproved theory of relativity” by proposing a theory that was obviously wrong for trivial reasons; it actually predicted that particles would move quite differently parallel to some absolute space axes x,y,z than diagonally. Since there are no obvious “straight” and “diagonal” directions in our universe, his hypothesis was completely wrong regardless of whether Einstein was right or wrong about some technical detail.)
So yeah. the gold standard is. of course. scientific prediction. My idea is very far away from such a thing! I actually do have some background in quantum mechanics (I have a physics minor :P) and at one point actually did have some understanding of Hamiltonian Operators and eigenstates and bra-ket notation. However that’s a far cry from the sort of needed mathematics to really understand the implications of what I’m talking about (this is why they say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing)! What I do have is enough knowledge to tentatively pose that my idea doesn’t contradict what we’ve actually seen in experiments (so I don’t think it’s trivially wrong).
I’m not too worried about proposing a possible explanation first then asking what it can explain. That may seem like a backwards way of doing things, but it might be a way to approach problems from a different angle. My guess is (having not read much scientific biography it’s hard to say) there were probably some scientists who developed the key ideas of their breakthroughs prior to completing formal training in their field. Besides, it’s a lot more effort for me to learn all this stuff then to just ask the question on on Internet forum!
I’m also not worried about becoming that Mensan. That dude put too much emotional stakes into being right about that. He is completely emotionally invested in the correctness of his idea and his own brilliance over Einstein. I’m keenly aware of the fact that I’m just some dude throwing some half-baked idea onto an Internet forum. I’m not at all worried if people think it’s crazy or wrong. And I’m not worried if it is wrong! What worries me more is if people don’t think it’s worth the time of day or is completely uninteresting. That would make me sad but not hugely sad, just kinda sorta sad. My contention is merely the idea is interesting enough to take somewhat seriously.