That’s one of the reasons why actually proving one interpetation to be true would be a major discovery.
Perhaps; but then scientists used to say the same thing about atoms and electrons, that they might as well be regarded as mathematically abstractions and that we’d never be able to actually prove they existed.
And while I don’t recommend it, there actually is an amusing way to prove the Many Worlds Interpetation. Build a device that will destroy the world, or at least humanity; if the MWI is true, it won’t work, because only the worlds where something goes wrong with it will still have anyone alive to notice. Every time you try to use it, something will go wrong, because in the worlds where it worked, there’s nobody left to notice. It has to be something that will either kill everything or not work at all, to weed out middle results. And, of course if the MWI is wrong, no one will be around to care. Not an idea original to me BTW.
I’m aware of that, which is why I think it should be looked at more. I’ve noticed over the years physicists repeatedly coming up with ideas for FTL and/or time travel, and others proving those ideas impossible or impractical, but never actually proving the whole idea impossible. I’m reminded of the days before the laws of thermodynamics were formulated, when perpetual motion devices were considered a far out but not impossible thing; as opposed to now, when just about any physicist will dismiss the idea out of hand because it violates the laws of thermodynamics.
I strongly suspect that there’s some sort of basic physical law(s) that would rule out FTL/timetravel, and finding it might well be a revolution, although of what magnitude there’s no way to tell. And of course, if FTL/time travel is possible that would be a huge one.
Also, it has been pointed out that the Many Worlds Interpetation can handle time travel without paradoxes; the time traveller just splits off a new branch.
No argument here. That’s actually the specific reason why I became a physicist. Many physicists have speculated on the existance of some absolute law which would rule out time travel, but nobody has found it yet.
And I will point out that the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn’t actually make anything any easier for time travel. Any “multiverse” which allowed for “splitting off branches” as science fiction authors are so fond of, would not be capable of satisfying the properties of the quantum mechanical “many worlds”. The many worlds interpretation works only if there is absolutely no possibility of communication between the worlds.
Come ON, Chronos. You can’t fool us. We all know that’s not true – just read Michael Crichton’s book Timeline and you’ll see how wrong you are. It explains it all real clear-like.
Not neccisarily - there were long debates as to wheter the Earth was a torus, not a sphere. And until space travel, it was entirely likely, with the equator facing out and the ploes joining at the center.
Section 2 of this paper (PostScript file, sorry) explores five possible “worlds” we might live in depending on the resolution of the P vs NP question. It’s not a popular exposition, but it’s relatively readable and could probably be turned into a popular exposition without a great deal of work.
A huge, huge revolution would be the discovery of a low-degree polynomial-time algorithm to solve an NP-Complete problem. If that happened, much of mathematics and science could essentially be automated; it would lead to thousands of new discoveries.
I see. But since there was a debate, then perhaps the torus belief was not as widespread as we’ve always been taught that the flat-Earth concept was back then?
That must have been a really slow news day at the BBC. There’s absolutely nothing new in that article, and even when the experiments described were new, they weren’t nearly as exciting as the popular press makes them out to be. Almost all of the situations you’ve read about with something travelling faster than the speed of light work by seriously stretching the definition of “something”. For instance, one might have the front end of a light pulse leave an apparatus before the back end of the pulse enters the apparatus (which in itself is perfectly yawn-inducing; it just means the pulse is longer than the apparatus), but then they pull some tricks so that the back part of the pulse going in looks like the middle of the pulse, and the front part coming out also looks like the middle, so it looks like the middle of the pulse leaves before it enters. Looks like, but it’s still really just two different parts of the pulse.
There was one result a few years ago which claimed to show information being transmitted faster than c (which would be a very interesting result, if true), but it was fraught with experimental irregularities, and once those irregulariities were removed, the results were irreproducible.
Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle has a similar line. He reckons that one day scientists will have figured everything out. When that happens, we’ll see the whole world fade to black and then a screen will come up saying, ‘Level 2’.
Not everybody believes that Universal Gravitation was such a great theory in the first place. This website seems to be the “flat earthers” of the gravitational world.
