Posts Tagged ‘quantum immortality’
Saturday Morning Breakfast Links
* The new issue of Science Fiction Studies is dedicated to Chinese science fiction.
* Breaking: Liberal arts majors didn’t kill the economy.
* Judith Butler’s Remarks to Brooklyn College on BDS.
* In the beginning, God created the wealth and the jobs. Now the wealth was a formless void and darkness covered the sources of value, while the spirit of capitalism hovered over the depths. And then God said, “Let there be jobs,” and there were jobs. And God saw that the jobs were not very good; and God separated the jobs from the surplus-value. God called the surplus-value Wealth, and the jobs he called Generosity. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. Genesis 1: A Neoliberal Account.
* SMBC tackles the unholy nexus of predestination and time travel.
* Janet Stephens, amateur hairdressing historian. Fun story, despite the classist overtones.
* The real Cuban missile crisis. So, both JFK and RFK were insane, I guess? Perhaps we should give this quantum immortality theory some serious consideration.
* Fox News screws up every day, but this one is pretty classic.
* There’s obviously some sort of long-term plan here that I don’t yet understand, like the time-bombs hidden in No Child Left Behind: North Carolina to formalize two “tracks” of high school diplomas, “job-ready” and “college-ready.”
* The Talmudic solution to the drone crisis: invent (another) secret, unaccountable court system in lieu of actual due process.
* And George Bush, painter.
Friday Linkfest
* The Portal 2s that could have been. I do, I happily admit, want to play all of these.
* Drop everything! My brilliant friend and colleague Melody Jue is now blogging at Philosophy of Water.
* At right is your photo of the day: An aurora over Faskrudsfjordur, Iceland.
* Joss Whedon explains how to write a sequel.
* Steal $80 million in a Ponzi scheme, get 18 months. Steal $4,367 in food stamps, get 3 years.
* The year without a winter. Things are going to get weirder. But don’t worry: God told James Inhofe global warming is a hoax.
* “I have not heard of another hug”: Janet Bell, Derrick Bell’s widow, speaks out.
* Pat Robertson gets one right: he says we ought to legalize it.
* The Seuss book no one’s bought us (yet): The Seven Lady Godivas: The True Facts Concerning History’s Barest Family.
* Jacob Burak crunches the odds on Russian Roulette. But he’s completely failed to account for the quantum immortality factor.
* Science quantifies the Tina Fey effect.
“When all other variables in the model are held at their mean, those who watched the SNL clip had a 45.4 percent probability of saying that Palin’s nomination made them less likely to vote for McCain,” they write. “This same probability drops to 34 percent among those who saw coverage of the debate through other media. Exposure to the clip had no significant effect on the likelihood of voting for Obama.”
* When Terry Kneiss wins a Showcase Showdown, son, he wins it.
* On chess, gender, and Laszlo Polgar’s Grandmaster Experiment.
* For more than two years, Adrian Schoolcraft secretly recorded every roll call at the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn and captured his superiors urging police officers to do two things in order to manipulate the “stats” that the department is under pressure to produce: Officers were told to arrest people who were doing little more than standing on the street, but they were also encouraged to disregard actual victims of serious crimes who wanted to file reports. I’m shocked, shocked! Followup to this This American Life story.
* The headline reads, “Breakthrough Alzheimer’s treatment stops brain damage in mice.”
* And TPM has today’s sci-fi architecture porn.
Everything Dies, Baby, That’s a Fact, but Maybe Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back
AskMetaFilter hits all my buttons with this question on non-theistic and scientific afterlives, including quantum immortality, the Omega Point, and (new to me) four-dimensionalism.
‘All the Myriad Ways’
“All the Myriad Ways,” a fun Larry Niven story that riffs off the notions of quantum suicide, linked to from Wikipedia’s quantum immortality page. There are others, like this amusing and extremely complicated comic I know I’ve linked to before: Jason Shiga’s “Meanwhile.” Still another: The Wigner’s friend paradox.
‘Cheap on assumptions but expensive on universes’
Quantum physics, multiple universes, and solving the “scandal” of probability, in the Telegraph. Ignore the lead’s focus on time travel; the real meat is towards the end:
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.
But the many worlds idea offers an alternative view. Dr 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. This work was attacked but it has now had rigorous confirmation by David Wallace and Simon Saunders, also at Oxford.
Dr Saunders, who presented the work with Wallace at the Many Worlds at 50 conference at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, told New Scientist: “We’ve cleared up the obscurities and come up with a pretty clear verdict that Everett works. It’s a dramatic turnaround and it means that people now have to discuss Everett seriously.”
Dr Deutsch added that the work addresses a three-century-old problem with the idea of probability itself, described by one philosopher, Prof David Papineau, as a scandal. “We didn’t really know what probability means,” said Dr Deutsch.
There’s a convention that it’s rational to treat it for most purposes as if we knew it was going to happen even though we actually know it need not. But this does not capture the reality, not least the 0.1 per cent chance something will not happen.
“So,” said Dr Deutsch, “the problems of probability, which were until recently considered the principal objection to the otherwise extremely elegant theory of Everett (which removes every element of mysticism and double-talk that have crept into quantum theory over the decades) have now turned into its principal selling point.”
Quantum immortality, please.
Parallel Worlds
Mathematicians claim proof of “many-worlds” interpretation of quantum theory. GeekPress already gets in the best possible line about this—Personally, I am [very excited]|[deeply skeptical] about this development— so I’ll just point out that this brings me one step closer to my long-held dream of quantum immortality.
Gerry Canavan 