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garmeth06 t1_iuqawjc wrote

Reply to comment by kromem in Does Science Need History? A Conversation with Lorraine Daston by Maxwellsdemon17

I'm having a very hard time linking your article to the many worlds interpretation in QM with any amount of rigour.

Nobody thinks (I hope) that postulating some vague assertions about "many worlds" is a novel 20th century idea. The importance in the physics world is, at most, the connection to understanding the wave function.

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kromem t1_iuqcbhw wrote

So IIRC the question was about the ontological principle within the context of any paradigm of many worlds in Physics, and if there were perspectives in which there wasn't a 'beginning.'

I'm pretty sure I mentioned how Everett's doesn't address the origin of the universe at all as it begins at the same point as this 'branch' of the universe, and instead pointed OP to other current models of multiple worlds like Lee Smolin's fecund universes.

Adding context, I mentioned that the notion goes back a long way (so there's been many different ideas regarding it), at least 2,500 years.

Oh, and while the article is mostly concerned with the Epicurean view of infinite universes from infinite discrete matter in infinite space across infinite time resulting in other locations of physical worlds similar to our own, they were absolutely thinking of very similar ideas to the concept of parallel universes with how they described the notion that dreams were representations of other worlds leaking into ours immaterialy.

As for what they had to do with the wave function, the name of the aforementioned book The Swerve came from how they tried to answer the perceived paradox of free will and quantized matter:

They concluded that the quanta must have some sort of uncertainty to how they would move such that it could end up going in more than one place from an initial state, and referred to what would guide the result to one potentiality or another as "the swerve."

(This was over two millennia before Bell's paradox, the experimental evidence of which was now the most recent Physics Nobel and where one of the proposed solutions for the behavior of quanta is the rejection of free will.)

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flowering_sun_star t1_iur34ym wrote

> where one of the proposed solutions for the behavior of quanta is the rejection of free will

The attempts to involve quantum physics with free will are widely regarded as a great steaming pile, and are rarely proposed by anyone with an inkling as to what quantum physics actually is. It is far too often treated as a form of magic get-out-of-causality-free card, and peddled by woo-mongers precisely because so few people have any understanding of the matter.

So yeah, you probably got banned for promoting unscientific nonsense.

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kromem t1_iurgirk wrote

> The attempts to involve quantum physics with free will are widely regarded as a great steaming pile, and are rarely proposed by anyone with an inkling as to what quantum physics actually is.

Are you disputing that determinism is a key factor in differentiating QM interpretations?

Does Sabine Hossenfelder have an inkling of what "quantum physics" is?

And do you realize that rejecting superdeterminism is necessarily a statement on free will (in agreement with the Epicurean view, which was non-deterministic)?

Yes, it's not as popularly considered in terms of Bell's theorem as the other two, but it is certainly still discussed by widely respected physicists.

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