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At Nature: The “bizarre logic” of the multiverse is explored in a review

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In a review of cosmologist Sean Carroll’s new book, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, we read:

Six decades on, the [many worlds/ multiverse] theory is one of the most bizarre yet fully logical ideas in human history, growing directly out of the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics without introducing extraneous elements. It has become a staple of popular culture, although the plots of the many films and television series inspired by it invariably flout the theory by relying on contact between the parallel worlds, as in the 2011 movie Another Earth.

In Something Deeply Hidden, Carroll cogently explains the many-worlds theory and its post-Everett evolution, and why our world nevertheless looks the way it does. Largely because of its purely logical character, Carroll calls Everett’s brainchild “the best view of reality we have” …

Nevertheless, non-scientists might have lingering problems with Carroll’s breezy, largely unexamined ideas about “reality”. Like many physicists, he assumes that reality is whatever a scientific theory says it is.

Robert P. Crease, “The bizarre logic of the many-worlds theory” at Nature

Crease writes as if he would very much like to buy in but still thinks that sanity has something to offer. Possibly, many establishment science figures teeter on that brink.

Sabine Hossenfelder offers a different perspective:

Hossenfelder Summarizes Multiverse Theories, Asks: Science Or Fiction?

and

Hossenfelder: The multiverse is a fringe idea

True, it’s a fringe idea. But it’s one very big fringe, trailing out the door and down the street and beyond the furthest galaxy…

Bunk, sure, but lotta bunk.

See also: The multiverse is science’s assisted suicide

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Comments
The cosmological fine-tuning of our laws of physics is incontrovertible, and this gives astrophysicists and other naturalism-worshipping scientists teleological nightmares. So they come up with crazy ideas like the Multiverse. They don’t seem to realize that this fanciful and unscientifically unfalsifiable theory along with its indefinite multiplication of unobservables just multiplies the explanatory deficit and corresponding origins problem immeasurably relative to just one universe - our own. The Multiverse and cosmic inflation constitutes a vastly larger more complex domain, containing vastly more complex specified information, starting with innumerable other local sets of laws of physics, and most importantly, there then must be immeasurably more complex meta-laws of physics that govern the cosmic inflation process itself and this immensely greater reality, laws that must inherently contain the potential for all the subsequent local laws of physics of the innumerable local sub-universes. And the origins problem just got immeasurably greater. You would think that these researchers would realize that these meta-laws must themselves be fine-tuned, in order to achieve the teleology-free meta-universe they are looking for. There’s no free lunch (apologies to Dembski). It seems that the Multiverse-espousing scientists have just traded a terminal headache for the original upset stomach.doubter
September 5, 2019
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" Carroll cogently explains the many-worlds theory" Can this legitimately be called a "theory"? The hypocrisy of evolutionists is glaring. They call anything a theory whenever they want to, but if some non-scientist says "It's only a theory". they get all huffed up and look down on these unscientific ignoramuses and chastise them for misusing the word "theory" - which in reality, they also do quite often.tjguy
September 4, 2019
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The "many worlds" interpretation of quantum physics does not explain the fine tuning in the universe, because all those many worlds would have the same physical laws and constants in play. To "explain" the fine tuning requires a different species of multiverse; one that magically generates universes with randomly different initial conditions and physical parameters - quite the feat for an untestable hypothesis. Then there are the multiverses in the same space-time continuum beyond our visible universe - say 60 billion light years and more from Earth - but presumably those too share the same fine tuning. Amazing all the things you can "explain" with a grab bag of multiverses. Convenient too that none of them are amenable to observation or testing.Fasteddious
September 4, 2019
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Everett's MVI doesn't, in my estimation, require a multitude of simultaneous, co-existing worlds. I'm reading Everett's Doctoral thesis (slowly), but Everett seems to be much influenced by Schrodinger's 1952 paper on quantum leaps, where he questions the orthodoxy of that era, saying that he, Schrodinger, sees things differently. He believes that QM can be entirely understood--and the experiments that are fundamental to this form of "classical" mechanics, as "wave-mechanical," which is ultimately Everett's departure point (Process 2 in his thesis). I had previously been dismissive of the MWI because of what it was purported to be telling us. And, as it happens, like so many other times, when you actually read the original source(s), you find that what other people tell you it says is not what the original author has actually said. Lo and behold, when I read Everett's thesis (the beginning and ending parts, and now onto the 'meat') it sounds exactly how I envision QM to work--though I didn't know if my way of thinking would lead to a workable theory. Everett's theorizing makes the point that QM is best understood as a (continuous, not discrete) wave mechanical phenomenon (that evolves in time) and promises to demonstrate this. I'll presume he's able to do this since Carroll himself takes him so seriously. I would just simply add that if one doesn't first read Dirac's 1952 paper on "jumps" (Do Jumps Really Happen?), then you might misunderstand where Everett is going with all of this. Instead of all these "worlds" living side-by-side, we're dealing with different superpositions of vibrations which, when added together, give us the "measured" energy "jump." The modern-day understanding of this would be, I believe, "decoherence." But, importantly, let's not confuse Multi-Worlds with Multi-Universes. That's not what Everett is talking about--though Carroll, perhaps, might be (I haven't read the book).PaV
September 4, 2019
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How do "fully logical" Multiverses pass through the Materialism! = Science! Exclusivity? Andrewasauber
September 4, 2019
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