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A Mathematical Answer To the Parallel Universe Question
diewlasing writes to mention that Oxford scientists have proffered a mathematical answer to the parallel universe question that is gaining some support in the scientific community. "According to quantum mechanics, unobserved particles are described by 'wave functions' representing a set of multiple 'probable' states. When an observer makes a measurement, the particle then settles down into one of these multiple options. The Oxford team, led by Dr. David Deutsch, showed mathematically that the bush-like branching structure created by the universe splitting into parallel versions of itself can explain the probabilistic nature of quantum outcomes."
. . . so it "can" explain (mathematically) the outcome of quantum level observations using the many worlds theory. But is it falsifiable?
Well, I am not a physicist, perhaps you are ...
Commenting in New Scientist magazine, Dr Andy Albrecht, a physicist at the University of California at Davis, said: "This work will go down as one of the most important developments in the history of science."
I would image something that is 'one of the most important developments in the history of science' might qualify as news. Don't you think? Even if proven not to be 'one of the most important' it certainly qualifies for recognition based on that possibility, IMHO.
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Seriously though, there's no sign of a citation from any of the people running the story (most of which are nearly identical, so they're probably just copying from the same press release), and there's no sign of it on arXiv or from a quick trawl of journal feeds, so it's a very good chance that it's either unpublished work, or a conference paper somewhere. Not surprising, given how many "most significant discoveries in the history of science" turn out to be much less dramatic under the cold hard light of review than when they're first reported.
There is a circular dependency here. The author assumes that the parallel universe interpretation is correct and then argues that if this interpretation is correct, then we can derive probabilistic nature of quantum of mechanics. All this means is that the parallel universe is a self-consistent theory. Nobody has argued against this for the last 50+ years.
The problem with quantum mechanics interpretation is that as of now, no interpretation exists which is not bizarre in our traditional world view. Parallel universe is just one of them.
The problem is that the brief news story was more focused on explaining what the Many Worlds hypothesis is to a lay audience and not really pointing out what the new breakthrough is really all about to a geek audience. Someone needs to link to science site and not a general news site.
Where does the energy come from to give existence to this second universe? This whole splitting of the universe thing seems common in physics, so I'm sure I'm not interpreting this correctly. It seems like there's entire universes being created because of the uncertainty of a single particle.
Strange that none of the wackos who advocate this, and I use the term very loosely, "theory", bother to expain where all of the mass and energy is coming from for all of these extra universes.
The mass and energy isn't coming from anywhere, because there's no new particles being created. The particles are the same ones, in all universes, their state is just getting more complex, and each "parallel universe" is just a description of one consistent state of all the particles of the universe over all histories. We only observe the particles as as having measurable (subject to Heisenberg) positions and velocities because we're using other particles to measure what those positions are.
A better question might be "where is the information needed to describe the state of the particle stored". Or to put it another way "how many bits does God's Computer have, and can we hack it?"