Quantum wave collapse is a deeply puzzling phenomenon. The idea that one might measure a particle's velocity or location, but not both with absolute certainty, or that distant particles some how share physical properties seemingly instantaneously and faster than light can travel, raises paradoxes that have yet - and may never - be addressed by science.
Why should a wave function with a seemingly endless possibility - that particle and a host of others might be anywhere headed in any direction - "collapse" to the single outcomes experienced by human observers?
Those unresolved issues were on my mind watching Nova's recent show "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives," which documented Hugh Everett's "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum possibility and Everett's life as seen through the eyes of his son, Mark Everett, and his father's biographer, Peter Byrne.
I was struck by this quote reading a transcript of an interview with Byrne about Everett's interpretation of quantum theory, which matches every possible state of the quantum wave with a "world" in which that state is realized by almost innumerable copies of the observer.
...wild as it sounds—a person splitting into numerous copies of herself Everett's theory has not been shown to be mathematically incorrect.
In other words, somewhere a copy of me is encountering every possible physical reality ever encoded by quantum states of being. I don't have a problem with a Many Worlds outcome itself, but I do find this idea of mathematical counter demonstration odd.
"Correctness" in the sense used by Byrne would seem to mean logically iterative and pure, whereas my limited understanding of math is that while it is in congress with meaning, it does not require logically positive finality. Godel demonstrated mathematical paradox is proof.
In other words, the suggestion that "everything possible, happens" might well be true. I certainly don't know and I'm ridiculously jealous of the theoretical physicists who can do the math. What insight! But suggesting that we must adopt the Many Worlds view because "a wave function collapsing to a single outcome" is "an interpretive view," which is countered by Everett's math strikes me as meaningless. It's an interpretive outcome because as humans that's how we encounter the world.
It's experience itself that is indivisible.
Wayne
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