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Comment by laserbeam | Hacker News Reader

I think the "parallel universe" analogies are misleading at best. I actually think most "narrative" explanations of quantum physics are as well. For a long time I used to imagine quantum physics with the same language we talk about superheroes and time travel and consciousness and whatever.

But then I actually saw some of the math (very basic Hisenberg uncertainty equations) and good comparisons to classical wave mechanics and wave interference. Everything made more sense.

As a layman with some very rudimentary understanding of the math, I would ignore ALL talk about "farming out" and "parallel universrs" and similar concepts. I think thise ideas are charged with too many interesting but fantastical elements which you probably don't find in actual quantum mechanics.

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> I think the "parallel universe" analogies are misleading at best. I actually think most "narrative" explanations of quantum physics are as well.

This is inherent to the problem of attempting to describe something that fundamentally does not work like the macroscopic world, using vocabulary rooted in that macroscopic world.

As a layperson with a math background who has dabbled in quantum computing, I agree.

It would help to call the "Everettian" interpretation by the original title given by Everett: the theory of the universal wave function.

Ignore the techno-babble about the multiverse. The way I understand Everett is simply as taking the math literally and seriously to its logical conclusion.

I think the minimum amount of understanding needed to grasp MWI is understanding the double slit experiment. The interference pattern is real, thus the waves are real, but we only experience one measurable outcome where a photon lands in a specific location. The probabilistic part is not which outcome happens but which outcome your reality follows.

My point is that analogy is influenced by fiction. It is too easy to attach concepts from fiction to the double slit experiment. Saying things like "which outcome your reality follows" are humane experiences overlapped on to the experiment, not something that arises from the experiment itself. Nor something that arises from the math.

I will humbly disagree. I don't think fiction plays into it much, more the other way around. I think the 'multiple universes' ideas in fiction are likely to have been inspired by those experimental results. Just knowing how the double slit experiment works made me consider that every wavefunction might result in an infinite number of outcomes that never interact again, despite always having a dim view of fiction with parallel worlds. The fictional multiverses still aren't plausible, since usually there is some interaction between the different worlds, and they don't well represent the continuous nature of things, but it seems a little less dumb conceptually having learned about that experiment, quantum erasure, etc.

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