Suppose I use the luck of Mat Cauthon to pick a random direction to fly my perfect spaceship. Assuming I live forever, do I eventually end up in a world that split from this world?
No. The splitting is not in physical space (the space through which you travel in a spaceship), but in configuration space. Each point in configuration space represents a particular arrangement of fundamental particles in real space.
Moving in real space changes your position in configuration space of course, but this doesn’t mean you’ll eventually move out of your old branch into a new one. After all, the branches aren’t static. You moving in real space is a particular aspect of the evolution of the universal wavefunction. Specifically, your branch (your world) is moving in configuration space.
Don’t think of the “worlds” in MWI as places. It’s more accurate to think of them as different (evolving) narratives or histories. Splitting of worlds is a bifurcation of narratives. Moving around in real space doesn’t change the narrative you’re a part of, it just adds a little more to it. Narratives can collide, as in the double slit experiment, which leads to things appearing as if both (apparently incompatible) narratives are true—the particle went through both slits. But we don’t see this collision of narratives at the macroscopic level.
Suppose I use the luck of Mat Cauthon to pick a random direction to fly my perfect spaceship. Assuming I live forever, do I eventually end up in a world that split from this world?
No. The splitting is not in physical space (the space through which you travel in a spaceship), but in configuration space. Each point in configuration space represents a particular arrangement of fundamental particles in real space.
Moving in real space changes your position in configuration space of course, but this doesn’t mean you’ll eventually move out of your old branch into a new one. After all, the branches aren’t static. You moving in real space is a particular aspect of the evolution of the universal wavefunction. Specifically, your branch (your world) is moving in configuration space.
Don’t think of the “worlds” in MWI as places. It’s more accurate to think of them as different (evolving) narratives or histories. Splitting of worlds is a bifurcation of narratives. Moving around in real space doesn’t change the narrative you’re a part of, it just adds a little more to it. Narratives can collide, as in the double slit experiment, which leads to things appearing as if both (apparently incompatible) narratives are true—the particle went through both slits. But we don’t see this collision of narratives at the macroscopic level.