back to indexSean Carroll: Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
Chapters
0:0 ManyWorlds Interpretation
4:35 Is Hilbert Space Finite
9:45 ManyWorlds Controversy
11:50 Alternatives
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of quantum mechanics, this idea that I don't think 00:00:06.760 |
we talked about, can you, this one of the most 00:00:14.000 |
at the human level, but at the physics level, 00:00:17.440 |
that at least the textbook definition of quantum mechanics 00:00:29.520 |
And two, what does it then mean to observe something 00:00:38.800 |
- Yeah, you know, my personal feeling, such as it is, 00:00:43.160 |
is that things like measurement and observers 00:00:49.120 |
a fundamental role in the ultimate laws of physics. 00:00:54.400 |
that's where all the evidence has been pointing. 00:00:57.000 |
I could be wrong and there's certainly a sense 00:01:06.760 |
did play a fundamental role in the nature of reality. 00:01:10.400 |
But I don't think so and I don't see any evidence for it, 00:01:16.560 |
So what do you do about the fact that in the textbook 00:01:20.300 |
this idea of measurement or looking at things 00:01:26.120 |
Well, you come up with better interpretations 00:01:28.760 |
of quantum mechanics and there are several alternatives. 00:01:30.720 |
My favorite is the many worlds interpretation, 00:01:38.440 |
are just a quantum system like anything else. 00:01:46.920 |
You obey the Schrodinger equation like everything else. 00:01:49.560 |
And number two, when you think you're measuring something 00:01:52.960 |
or observing something, what's really happening is 00:01:58.720 |
So when you think that there's a wave function 00:02:02.120 |
but you look at it and you only see it in one location. 00:02:04.920 |
What's really happening is that there's still 00:02:07.040 |
the wave function for the electron in all those locations, 00:02:09.280 |
but now it's entangled with the wave function of you 00:02:15.640 |
the electron was here and you think you saw it there. 00:02:18.680 |
The electron was there and you think you saw it there. 00:02:20.920 |
The electron was over there and you think you saw it there. 00:02:23.880 |
So, and all of those different parts of the wave function, 00:02:26.680 |
once they come into being, no longer talk to each other. 00:02:29.920 |
They no longer interact or influence each other. 00:02:34.640 |
So this was the invention of Hugh Everett III, 00:02:37.680 |
who was a graduate student at Princeton in the 1950s. 00:02:46.720 |
Just listen to what the Schrodinger equation is telling you. 00:02:49.300 |
It's telling you that you have a wave function, 00:02:57.720 |
It's just, he did therapy more than anything else. 00:03:03.360 |
All you need to do is believe the Schrodinger equation. 00:03:05.520 |
The cost is there's a whole bunch of extra worlds out there. 00:03:15.640 |
- The worlds are created any time a quantum system 00:03:32.360 |
and it obeys the Schrodinger equation all the time. 00:03:38.880 |
The question, all of the work, is how in the world 00:03:47.480 |
So part of it is carving up the wave function 00:03:56.080 |
Another part is distinguishing between systems 00:04:00.080 |
And the environment is basically all the degrees of freedom, 00:04:08.800 |
I might keep track of the total amount of water 00:04:12.280 |
I don't keep track of the individual positions 00:04:20.440 |
The outside world is all the parts of the universe 00:04:24.620 |
when you're asking about the behavior of some subsystem of it. 00:04:57.860 |
overlap, a duplicate world that you return to? 00:05:05.780 |
So you've mentioned, and I'd love if you can elaborate on, 00:05:23.980 |
- Yeah, so this question of whether or not Hilbert space 00:05:30.020 |
is actually secretly connected to gravity and cosmology. 00:05:43.440 |
which we think it probably will, but we're not sure, 00:05:45.200 |
but if it does, that means there's a horizon around us. 00:06:02.600 |
and that horizon approaches some fixed distance 00:06:07.000 |
And you can then argue that within that horizon, 00:06:14.540 |
In fact, we even have a guess for what the dimensionality is 00:06:17.720 |
is 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 122. 00:06:31.660 |
The number of particles in the universe is 10 to the 88th. 00:06:34.420 |
But the number of dimensions of Hilbert space 00:06:41.540 |
If that story is right, that in our observable horizon, 00:06:45.020 |
there's only a finite dimensional Hilbert space, 00:06:47.840 |
then this idea of branching of the wave function 00:06:50.460 |
of the universe into multiple distinct separate branches 00:07:00.020 |
And roughly speaking, that corresponds to the universe 00:07:02.820 |
just expanding and emptying out and cooling off 00:07:06.060 |
and entering a phase where it's just empty space, 00:07:10.440 |
- What's the difference between splitting and copying, 00:07:16.940 |
Like in terms of, a lot of this is an interpretation 00:07:38.220 |
do you see a difference between sort of generating 00:07:45.340 |
- I think it's better to think of in quantum mechanics, 00:07:48.220 |
in many worlds, the universe splits rather than new copies, 00:08:02.340 |
the universe duplicates, then you have a reasonable worry 00:08:04.500 |
about where all the energy for that came from. 00:08:16.460 |
and you draw a vector of length one, 45 degree angle, 00:08:20.740 |
you know that you can write that vector of length one 00:08:23.460 |
as the sum of two vectors pointing along X and Y 00:08:29.340 |
So I write one arrow as the sum of two arrows, 00:08:33.220 |
but there's a conservation of arrow-ness, right? 00:08:40.300 |
And that's exactly what happens when the universe branches. 00:08:42.660 |
The wave function of the universe is a big old vector. 00:08:45.640 |
- So to somebody who brings up a question of saying, 00:08:49.740 |
doesn't this violate the conservation of energy? 00:08:57.040 |
- Right, so let's just be super duper perfectly clear. 00:09:00.300 |
There's zero question about whether or not many worlds 00:09:06.340 |
And I say this definitively because there are other 00:09:18.620 |
and the answer to it is that energy is conserved. 00:09:21.140 |
All of the effort goes into how best to translate 00:09:29.340 |
So this idea that there's a universe that has, 00:09:31.220 |
that the universe comes equipped with a thickness, 00:09:34.100 |
and it sort of divides up into thinner pieces, 00:09:36.380 |
but the total amount of universe is conserved over time 00:09:39.960 |
is a reasonably good way of putting English words 00:09:45.660 |
- So one of my favorite things about many worlds is, 00:09:49.160 |
I mean, I love that there's something controversial 00:09:52.460 |
in science, and for some reason it makes people 00:09:57.060 |
actually not like upset, but just get excited. 00:10:04.240 |
So there's a lot of, it's actually one of the cleanest 00:10:10.680 |
So why do you think there's a discomfort a little bit 00:10:21.280 |
There's simplicity in the theory itself, right? 00:10:24.560 |
How we describe what's going on according to the theory 00:10:28.520 |
But then, you know, a theory is just some sort 00:10:31.760 |
You have to map it onto the world somehow, right? 00:10:38.600 |
it's pretty obvious, like, okay, here is a bottle, 00:10:41.960 |
and it has a center of mass, and things like that. 00:10:46.040 |
with general relativity, curvature of space-time 00:10:54.120 |
what the language you're talking in of wave functions 00:10:58.560 |
And many worlds is the version of quantum mechanics 00:11:01.400 |
where it is hardest to map on the underlying formalism 00:11:06.160 |
So that's where the lack of simplicity comes in, 00:11:09.320 |
not in the theory, but in how we use the theory 00:11:13.280 |
And in fact, all of the work in sort of elaborating 00:11:17.240 |
many worlds quantum mechanics is in this effort 00:11:22.720 |
So it's perfectly legitimate to be bugged by that, right? 00:11:26.680 |
To say like, well, no, that's just too far away 00:11:31.240 |
I am therefore intrinsically skeptical of it. 00:11:34.880 |
Of course, you should give up on that skepticism 00:11:39.360 |
then eventually you should overcome your skepticism. 00:11:41.560 |
But right now, there are alternatives that are, 00:11:52.800 |
So the Copenhagen interpretation and the many worlds, 00:11:57.800 |
maybe there's a difference between the Everettian 00:12:05.520 |
like has the idea sort of developed and so on. 00:12:15.640 |
- 12 candidates on stage. - 12 candidates on stage. 00:12:25.480 |
there'd be no problem getting 12 people up there on stage, 00:12:28.600 |
but there would still be only three front runners. 00:12:32.280 |
And right now the front runners would be Everett. 00:12:41.400 |
but there's something in addition to the wave function. 00:12:45.440 |
it's part of reality, but it's not everything. 00:13:05.160 |
but under certain observational circumstances, 00:13:19.240 |
are just non-relativistic Newtonian particles moving around, 00:13:22.880 |
they get pushed around by the wave function roughly. 00:13:26.080 |
It becomes much harder when you take quantum field theory 00:13:31.600 |
The other big contender are spontaneous collapse theories. 00:13:36.040 |
So in the conventional textbook interpretation, 00:13:51.800 |
of having its wave function spontaneously collapse. 00:14:02.360 |
there are way more than a hundred million particles 00:14:19.140 |
between two parts of the wave function becomes too large, 00:14:38.640 |
or collapse theories, which the wave function 00:15:00.460 |
sort of a probabilistic description of the world 00:15:03.620 |
and is collapse sort of reducing that part of the world 00:15:10.860 |
and I'll describe the position and the velocity 00:15:19.780 |
There's a Mayor Pete of quantum mechanical interpretations, 00:15:29.720 |
is a way of making predictions for experimental outcomes. 00:15:41.500 |
because they know different things about it, right? 00:15:43.660 |
The wave function is really just a prediction mechanism. 00:15:46.220 |
And then the problem with those epistemic interpretations 00:15:53.900 |
like what is the thing that is being predicted? 00:16:00.700 |
what the observational outcomes are gonna be. 00:16:02.700 |
- But the other interpretations kind of think 00:16:09.040 |
So that's an ontic interpretation of the wave function, 00:16:12.860 |
ontology being the study of what is real, what exists, 00:16:18.820 |
epistemology being the study of what we know. 00:16:20.780 |
- I would actually just love to see that debate on stage. 00:16:26.420 |
at the World Science Festival a few years ago 00:16:43.840 |
and David Albert stood up for spontaneous collapse 00:16:46.960 |
and Shelley Goldstein was there for hidden variables 00:16:49.860 |
and RĂ¼diger Schock was there for epistemic approaches. 00:17:01.620 |
One is, like I said, it is the simplest, right? 00:17:10.980 |
to put a lot of work into mapping the formalism 00:17:14.280 |
I'm less willing to complicate the formalism itself. 00:17:18.540 |
is that there's something called modern physics 00:17:23.780 |
and holography and space-time, doing things like that. 00:17:30.180 |
of quantum theory, they bring along classical baggage. 00:17:33.780 |
All of the other versions of quantum mechanics 00:17:36.060 |
prejudice or privilege some version of classical reality 00:17:46.720 |
to doing better at understanding the theory of everything 00:17:55.120 |
here's a harmonic oscillator, oh, there's a spin, 00:17:59.640 |
in hidden variable theories or dynamical collapse theories, 00:18:04.420 |
well, what are the hidden variables for this theory? 00:18:12.160 |
So when we have a situation like we have with gravity 00:18:14.820 |
and space-time, where the classical description 00:18:21.320 |
then I think you should start from the most quantum theory