Whenever I hear about things, I always think of it in terms of simulating a universe in a computer. After all, our universe (or group of universes) could be nothing more than a computer simulation, right? And it helps me think about things in that way.
So you are God and you're writing the code to simulate the universe. You've carefully set up your laws of physics such that matter and energy are always conserved from one moment in time (I'm reticent to use the word "quantum" in this context) to the next. However, when it comes to coding up your quantum simulation and spawn off multiple universes, there's really no reason to preserve energy. It's not even a useful context to preserve energy across a split of universes. So you would quite literally duplicate your data structures. All of the matter and energy is duplicated. If a person happened to be living in one of those universes (the one you split or the one you created), he wouldn't be any the wiser. It's not like he has access to the energy in the other universe.
So, like I said, you would just duplicate your data structures. The would be identical (and maybe even share some references for efficiency's sake), except for one single datum, which would be a 0 in one universe and a 1 in the other. Probably before long, both universes would become isomorphic, and they would get merged back together, with all the data structures you just duplicated getting garbage collected.
If a coder can do it, so can God.
It does also demonstrate the "non-economical sense" of the many-worlds interpretation. Maybe God is sharing references between universes, like I said. Hopefully he's utilizing some sort of copy-on-write semantics as well to avoid costly copy operations:)
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever I hear about things, I always think of it in terms of simulating a universe in a computer. After all, our universe (or group of universes) could be nothing more than a computer simulation, right? And it helps me think about things in that way.
So you are God and you're writing the code to simulate the universe. You've carefully set up your laws of physics such that matter and energy are always conserved from one moment in time (I'm reticent to use the word "quantum" in this context) to the next. However, when it comes to coding up your quantum simulation and spawn off multiple universes, there's really no reason to preserve energy. It's not even a useful context to preserve energy across a split of universes. So you would quite literally duplicate your data structures. All of the matter and energy is duplicated. If a person happened to be living in one of those universes (the one you split or the one you created), he wouldn't be any the wiser. It's not like he has access to the energy in the other universe.
So, like I said, you would just duplicate your data structures. The would be identical (and maybe even share some references for efficiency's sake), except for one single datum, which would be a 0 in one universe and a 1 in the other. Probably before long, both universes would become isomorphic, and they would get merged back together, with all the data structures you just duplicated getting garbage collected.
If a coder can do it, so can God.
It does also demonstrate the "non-economical sense" of the many-worlds interpretation. Maybe God is sharing references between universes, like I said. Hopefully he's utilizing some sort of copy-on-write semantics as well to avoid costly copy operations :)