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Comment by anal_reactor | Hacker News Reader

I feel like quantum physics is gently pointing us towards the idea "everything you can imagine is real at once". As in, all possible universes and physics systems and whatnot do exist in some sense of this word, and we happen to inhabit one. Just like Earth is a totally unremarkable planet in a totally unremarkable solar system in a totally unremarkable galaxy, except we popped up here so for a long time we thought there's something deeply special about Earth.

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Quantum mechanics doesn't imply at all that everything possible is actual. That is a misconception.

I do agree that it makes sense, but not because of what quantum mechanics says.

Yes, it doesn't imply, but parallel universes is one of possible interpretations.

If you are referring to the many-worlds interpretation, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. There is no implication in many-worlds that every conceivable world exists as a branch of the actual wave function.

I fail to see how this doesn't lead to "every possible world". Maybe some edge cases are ruled out, but it seems to imply every possible world as far as what that means to the imagination.

It is constrained by whatever you take as the initial conditions. The quantum state of the universe is a specific and precise thing, as well as how it evolves over time. It can be taken as a vector in Hilbert space that evolves according to the Schrödinger equation. There is no implication that the resulting path will have it visit every point in Hilbert space, or that the slices of the wave function that represent individual “worlds” somehow cover all worlds present in the unvisited points.

This sounds like "technically no but in practice yes". Like a TV screen cannot display all visible colors, but it's close enough that we consider the job done.

The math does imply infinite universes. There are many physicists who believe that all these worlds do exist.

And a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzKWfw68M5U&list=PLsPUh22kYm...

Infinite universes doesn’t imply every possible universe. I don’t disagree about them existing.

I find it more useful to anchor the concept of "real" in what one has direct access to. Beyond that there are many ways to describe our shared reality and the space of possible realities, including the past and future, some of which are more real than others, and go far beyond what we can imagine. Quantum physics gives us a language to expand what we can describe and imagine.

Not only does the sun not rotate around us, the rest of the galaxy doesn't even care to think that we exist. An interesting evolution in thought nonetheless.

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