The set of things out on the fringe of quantum possibilities (1 out of 10^100^100, for example, and beyond) is quite odd. The probability of your body spontaneously rearranging itself to be much younger is minuscule (to a degree of "minuscule" you've never thought about before) but non-zero, for instance.
However, it has been pointed out that if this is true, it is actually quite horrible. Reality may not permit you to fully die, but only a vanishing fraction of the vanishing fraction of realities involves you being anything like healthy; the maximal probability outcome by a long shot is you simple hanging on to a minimal life through a series of increasingly unlikely quantum events but never returning to anything like health.
Quantum-multiple-world believers better damn well hope it's not actually true. Actually, we all better damn well hope it's not true.
On a similar note, while it is funny to talk about how unlikely these events are, it seems to me that if the Higgs is offended about being observed and quantum-destroys the universes it is produced in, the way it would actually manifest is that it would seem that just as a particular particle collision is about to occur that would produce the Higgs, the resulting collision would simply conform to the probability distribution of the Higgs production, along with all the other possible outcomes, minus the Higgs production possibility. (That is, if it's 20% Higgs, 40% something with an anti-proton, 40% something with a proton, it'll manifest as an anomalous observation of 50% proton, 50% anti-proton.) The universe is not going to reach out across 10^52-ish planck instants to do something like drop bread on a machine weeks before it would be brought up; by far the maximum probability is that it would happen in the last few Planck instants, for each potential Higgs production. So, it's a fun story, but I don't see the probabilities adding up for it to be "true". Incidentally, if true, this may be able to be experimentally observed, in that we would be able to see the distorted outcome probabilities.
it seems to me that if the Higgs is offended about being observed and quantum-destroys the universes it is produced in
You seem to be conflating the "Higgs production does something funny to suppress the amplitude of possible histories leading to the event" hypothesis with the "LHC destroys the world with black holes/stable strangelets/vacuum energy state change/etc., so only futures with a broken LHC have humans around to observe" hypothesis. The net result is similar but the mechanism is different (unless it's equivalent in some weird quantum way--I don't pretend to be an expert on this stuff).
In either case, if each event has a chance of occurring during a particle collision, there must be some finite number of collisions beyond which some event such as "a fragment of Boltzmann Bread[0] appears in a critical component of the LHC" becomes more likely than "no world-ending event occurring in X collisions".
In particular, there's not a need for the universe to anthropomorphically "reach across" an extended range of time; under MWI assumptions, all the hypothetical LHC-stopping coincidences will happen anyway in some world of arbitrarily small likelihood, but if the LHC is unexpectedly omnicidal, only those unlikely universes will have future observers to look back and marvel at how strange it is.
"You seem to be conflating the "Higgs production does something funny to suppress the amplitude of possible histories leading to the event" hypothesis with the "LHC destroys the world with black holes/stable strangelets/vacuum energy state change/etc., so only futures with a broken LHC have humans around to observe" hypothesis."
No, I'm not. I'm really only talking about the suppressed amplitude case, as it is the only interesting thing. "Quantum suicide" is a direct, uninteresting, and hopefully untrue trivial consequence of MWI, and generalizing to civilizations is also trivial.
""a fragment of Boltzmann Bread[0] appears in a critical component of the LHC" becomes more likely than "no world-ending event occurring in X collisions"."
Ah, but you're getting caught up in the wrong formulation of the problem. The question is not "Is sticking a bit of bread in the wrong place going to prevent the Higgs from forming?", it is, "Given that the universe will attempt to prevent the Higgs from forming for the sake of argument, what is the most likely way in which it will manifest?"
Does sticking a bit of bread in the wrong place do the job? Yes. But it's a fantastically improbable manifestation of a quantum effect where merely "not forming the Higgs boson at time of collision" is way, way less improbable, what with the odds against a Higgs in the first place.
The probability of "bit o' quirky event plus a bit of bad design" is well in the domain of human experience. The probability of "this is the lowest-effort way the Universe could find to shut down the production of a Higgs" is absurdly small, when I can easily lay out "easier" things, including simply not making Higgs when the opportunity arises, which requires merely a couple of quantum zigs instead of zags within very small fractions of a second of the potential collision, rather than an enormously long chain of causation spanning human-perceivable time frames, all of which are unspeakably huge from the quantum world's viewpoint.
"while it is funny to talk about how unlikely these events are ..."
individually the scenarios may be highly improbable - but as a category, aren't there more ways a mechanical failure point could play out at the macroscopic level, than ways the particle collision event could spontaneously "mis-manifest"?
"The universe is not going to reach out across 10^52-ish planck instants to do something like drop bread on a machine weeks before it would be brought up"
a universe could reach out two weeks before, or a week plus 1 femto second, or it may drop cheese instead of bread, etc. - aren't there more histories like this across all the many-worlds, than ones involving last-moment quantum weirdness?
"individually the scenarios may be highly improbable - but as a category, aren't there more ways a mechanical failure point could play out at the macroscopic level, than ways the particle collision event could spontaneously "mis-manifest"?"
There are a lot more ways that a mechanical failure could manifest, yes, but it is simply drowned in the histories in which they don't manifest. Another one of those 10^100^100 sorts of numbers when we're talking at the quantum scale.
Whereas even if everything goes perfectly fine, Higgs production is expected to be a low probability event, and just having it "not happen" is way, way, way, way (and so on) way less "probability work", to coin an ill-defined phrase that has tantalizing mathematical overtones.
I didn't just make up the 10^52-ish number, I actually looked it up and tried to make it plausible. That's an awfully large branching factor for the universe to be reaching out to have an effect (ponder those 52 zeros for a moment; even if you drop half of them we're still well into la-la land) whereas as perverse as "a bird dropped a bit of bread on an exposed component" may seem, it is, frankly, well within normal human experience with probabilities, as is someone making the requisite design errors to permit that.
(I am just making up the 10^100^100 number. The probabilities are well beyond my intuition to guess at besides "effectively impossible by any reasonable definition of the term.")
I mean, I'm enjoying these articles and I enjoyed the linked article, but they are jokes. At least, I know the linked article is a joke and I hope the physicists saying these are actually possibly being caused by the Higgs are joking as they also ought to be able to do this analysis... although you just never know. The human tendency to anthropomorphize everything, to see "the universe will cause an improbable event to manifest" in terms of "humans will see something humanly absurd happen in a macroscopic scale" (noting humanly absurd != improbable) is very, very strong.
(Note that I do not consider the idea that the universe will somehow cancel any production of Higgs as a joke; that's perfectly respectable physics. I just consider it a joke that it would manifest in some macroscopic way weeks before the event.)
it isn't sweet, since there are likely more unpleasant than pleasant ways of remaining conscious.
"The Sibyl of Cumae, who led Aeneas on his journey to the underworld, for which he collected the Golden Bough, was the most famous prophetess of the ancient world. Beloved of Apollo, she was given anything she might desire. She asked for eternal life. Sadly, Apollo granted her wish, for she had forgotten to ask for eternal youth. Now dried, dessicated, and shrunken, she is carried in a cricket cage, and when the boys ask her what she desires, she says: 'I want to die.'" http://www.history-of-culture.org/Lectures/Part_2/22302.htm
This only means the LHC can't kill you; it doesn't make you immortal. The LHC will continue to fail, but you're free to leap from the Empire State Building and have several people observe you die in that particular reality.
But the LHC can't kill you is because if it does, it would be unimportant since I wouldn't be around to observe such a reality right? So all realities I observe are those which I am conscious in right?
So if I jump of the Empire State Building, I die. However that reality no longer matters because my consciousness no longer exists in it. But another reality where I didn't jump off, I'm still conscious, therefore it's all I remember.
It depends. The problem with the many worlds theory (which I don't subscribe to) is there are many variations. One would be that there are variations of reality only specific to you. Another is that variations of reality exist but continue their course regardless of your interaction with them. The article is funny because it mixes a silly concept with a proven one, that of observation having a bearing on reality.
Many-worlds isn't really a silly concept. It's one of several interpretations that are equally consistent with current experimental results, and it does have nice properties such as avoiding nondeterminism and nonlocality. It's also (in a way) a conceptually simpler theory, in that many-worlds is roughly what you'd have if you got rid of wave function collapse and naively applied the rest of quantum mechanics. If memory serves me, a substantial percentage of physicists consider many-worlds to be plausible, or even likely.
Also, be careful when talking about "observation having a bearing on reality"--the quantum mechanical sense of "observing" state has little to do with the conventional meaning of the word, and absolutely nothing to do with the presence of a conscious observer. On the other hand, an "observer" in the anthropic sense, in the quantum suicide experiment, is generally assumed to be a conscious being (though this isn't strictly required).
many-worlds is roughly what you'd have if you got rid of wave function collapse and naively applied the rest of quantum mechanics
Okay, but that suggests wave function collapse is erroneous whereas many-worlds is more likely. Based on that alone you can see why I'd consider many-worlds silly. Also, I'd say anyone entertaining it as plausible or even likely is probably reasoning from a purely mathematical vantage point, which is simply not accurate enough to draw such conclusions from. I can't see how else they'd arrive at its feasibility. I don't believe Shrodinger or Einstein would ever propose it.
Also, be careful when talking about "observation having a bearing on reality"--the quantum mechanical sense of "observing" state has little to do with the conventional meaning of the word, and absolutely nothing to do with the presence of a conscious observer
Hmm, here I won't argue directly against that statement, but instead offer this: If a tree falls in the forest when no one is around does it make a sound? I'm pretty sure you know the answer is 'No', and that's more of where my conscious observation of reality statement came from.
Okay, but that suggests wave function collapse is erroneous whereas many-worlds is more likely. Based on that alone you can see why I'd consider many-worlds silly. Also, I'd say anyone entertaining it as plausible or even likely is probably reasoning from a purely mathematical vantage point, which is simply not accurate enough to draw such conclusions from. I can't see how else they'd arrive at its feasibility. I don't believe Shrodinger or Einstein would ever propose it.
Wave function collapse wouldn't be so much erroneous as an illusion; it would still describe the way in which other quantum states would decohere and become inaccessible from the perspective of an observer. Remember, these interpretations are equally supported by experiment at this point. Far from being silly, that's exactly why many physicists consider many-worlds to be more likely--wave function collapse seems to be an unnecessary addition that complicates the theory for no benefit (see also: Occam's Razor).
Furthermore, reasoning from a purely mathematical perspective is generally better, in this case. Our intuitions about reality are so shaped by the size and energy levels we experience that thinking about quantum mechanical or relativistic phenomena in terms of "physical reality" instead of mathematical structure is likely to lead to misunderstandings and mistakes. Some physicists would argue, actually, that wave function collapse is exactly that sort of mistake.
There are a few well-known physicists in favor of many-worlds--Hawking and Feynman, for instance, the latter of whom won a Nobel Prize for his work relating to quantum mechanics. As for Einstein, you may recall his unhappiness at quantum mechanics being nonlocal ("spooky action at a distance") and nondeterministic ("god playing dice with the universe")--whereas the many-worlds interpretation restores both locality and determinism.
In the end, I'm no expert, and can't really make any statements about what is or isn't likely, but calling many-worlds "silly" is almost certainly incorrect. It's no sillier than quantum mechanics as a whole.
Hmm, here I won't argue directly against that statement, but instead offer this: If a tree falls in the forest when no one is around does it make a sound? I'm pretty sure you know the answer is 'No', and that's more of where my conscious observation of reality statement came from.
That question depends on the definition of "sound", actually. Does it mean "longitudinal pressure waves in a physical medium" or does it mean "the subjective experience a human has when perceiving pressure waves in air at certain frequencies"? The answer to the question is completely obvious, and different, in both cases.
Wave function collapse wouldn't be so much erroneous as an illusion;
[grin] I don't have time to respond to this adequately.
Furthermore, reasoning from a purely mathematical perspective is generally better, in this case. Our intuitions about reality are so shaped by the size ...
I'd agree if the math looked sensible at that level, but I don't think it ever can, because quantum strangeness is simply built in. I didn't know Hawking favored many worlds. Interesting. As for Einstein's unhappiness with quantum entanglement, I think he would look for any other solution before considering many-worlds. I will admit to being biased with my "silly" pronouncement because of my own theoretical musings, and concede that others without such bias could be more open to it. Regarding the "sound" I agree with you, so let me rephrase the question: If a tree falls in a forest when no one is around, did it really fall? This gets more to the point I was getting at - that of the perceived universe being different, or actually, to be more specific the only universe. If the tree in question fell, but for all eternity no one ever received any information about it, then it did not fall.
It's a pleasure to discuss such things with other intellectuals, although I hadn't planned on ramping up the brainwaves beyond the work I need to attend to today. Cheers. :)
There is a rather more dramatic test than the one outlined above for people prepared to put their lives on the line: use a machine which kills them if a random quantum decay happens. If MWI is true, they will still be alive in the world where the decay didn't happen and would feel no interruption in their stream of consciousness. By repeating this process a number of times, their continued consciousness would be arbitrarily unlikely unless MWI was true, when they would be alive in all the worlds where the random decay was on their side. From their viewpoint they would be immune to this death process. Clearly, if MWI does not hold, they would be dead in the one world. Other people would generally just see them die and would not be able to benefit from the result of this experiment.
So it seems that the MWI assumes that all possible realities exist simultaneously? If this is true, then trying to commit suicide would make logical sense. You can do crazy stunts and not die, and if you don't die, you'd become famous.
What I meant by variations only specific to you would be like The Truman Show, where everything is staged for the main character. This would mean that you only think everything else exists, but it's really only you that exists, and with many worlds there would be different realities you experienced. In that way, you couldn't die because you are the only one doing the observing.
There is a flaw with that wikipedia example (which is based on Schrodinger's cat): the next time you walk into the machine the decay event is different. You could only walk through and find your fate a maximum of one time, win or lose, as the next attempt, if you were around, would be a different decay event.
Sweet, but what if all possible realities are of me dying?