Jun 21, 2025 02:00 AM
(This post was last modified: Jun 21, 2025 10:39 PM by C C.)
You knew Gödel would be in there somewhere.
Gamechange: Theories of everything can’t exist, physicists show ... https://youtu.be/tM2N6Qypq_g
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/tM2N6Qypq_g
Are many worlds and pilot wave the same theory?
https://youtu.be/BUHW1zlstVk
Are Many Worlds & Pilot Wave THE SAME Theory? ... https://youtu.be/BUHW1zlstVk
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/BUHW1zlstVk
Gamechange: Theories of everything can’t exist, physicists show ... https://youtu.be/tM2N6Qypq_g
Are many worlds and pilot wave the same theory?
https://youtu.be/BUHW1zlstVk
VIDEO EXCERPT: . . . In pilot wave theory, the cascade of superpositions doesn't end at the detector, nor at the computer screen. Instead, we end up with a superposition of our brain in many states--each corresponding to an awareness of the photon landing in a different spot.
But only one of these is "real" because it carries corpuscles. The rest are the phantom, corpuscle-empty wavefunctions of our brains as they would have looked if the particle landed in other locations.
This is probably a good time to get to the Many Worlds Interpretation. Fortunately I don’t have to describe how our double-slit experiment looks in Many Worlds because I just described it. Take pilot wave theory and just subtract the corpuscles.
The corpuscles served as markers of which of these diverging alternate realities was the real one. But the corpuscles themselves have no influence on the wavefunction, so they really are just labels.
Without the corpuscle, all the branches of the wavefunction are empty—all are ghosts, or perhaps none of them are. The wavefunction in pilot wave theory and in many worlds behaves exactly the same way.
And that includes not collapsing, and not being random. The main difference between the two is the existence or not of the corpuscules.
In pilot wave theory, corpuscules mark real physical reality, while many worlds accepts that the wavefunction itself is the primary and really sole elementary constituent of physical reality.
Another difference is the guiding equation in pilot wave theory. Many worlds doesn’t need it because the evolution of the wavefunction alone only needs the Schrodinger equation.
This guiding equation presents its own issues. The main one is that it needs to know about not just the corpuscle in question, but also every other corpuscle connected to it via entanglement. It needs this to ensure that all corpuscles are always funneled into the one “real” world.
This means that the Guiding Equation is explicitly non-local, causing instantaneous interactions between corpuscles across arbitrarily large regions of space. In fact, we now know that it’s impossible for any hidden variable theory, like Pilot Wave Theory, to preserve locality. Because of this no one has managed to make pilot wave theory play nice with special relativity.
However it’s easy enough to make our theory relativistic if we just delete the corpuscles—but then of course we have Many Worlds. Occam’s razor tells us that the simplest explanation is usually the most correct. Don’t add parameters to your model if they aren’t needed.
Some have said that the branching timelines of Many Worlds is an addition that goes against Occam’s razor—but proponents of Many Worlds say that these timelines are a core prediction of raw quantum mechanics. To get rid of them you have to add something: either the collapse of the wavefunction in Copenhagen, or the tagging of the “one true world” with corpuscles in pilot wave theory.
Let’s ask one more question: do any of these interpretations explain the Born rule? We know that Copenhagen just takes it on faith that you need to square the wavefunction to get the probabilities.
Do they fall out more naturally in pilot wave theory or many worlds?
Well, in pilot wave theory the probability of getting a measurement in a particular location depends on the distribution of corpuscles. It turns out that if you start the universe with the corpuscules distributed according to the Born rule—so their density being proportional to the square of the wavefunction—then at all later times they’ll retain that distribution, and so the Born rule will continue to work. But pilot wave theory doesn’t tell us how the corpuscles got distributed that way in the first place.
In many worlds, the probability of recording a particular measurement value is the probability of you finding yourself in a timeline where that value actually happened. So it’s about the density of timelines—how many alternate realities correspond to your measurement.
And the fact is, you CAN recover the born rule with this sort of statistics of alternate worlds. You can calculate the probability of landing in one particular world...
But only one of these is "real" because it carries corpuscles. The rest are the phantom, corpuscle-empty wavefunctions of our brains as they would have looked if the particle landed in other locations.
This is probably a good time to get to the Many Worlds Interpretation. Fortunately I don’t have to describe how our double-slit experiment looks in Many Worlds because I just described it. Take pilot wave theory and just subtract the corpuscles.
The corpuscles served as markers of which of these diverging alternate realities was the real one. But the corpuscles themselves have no influence on the wavefunction, so they really are just labels.
Without the corpuscle, all the branches of the wavefunction are empty—all are ghosts, or perhaps none of them are. The wavefunction in pilot wave theory and in many worlds behaves exactly the same way.
And that includes not collapsing, and not being random. The main difference between the two is the existence or not of the corpuscules.
In pilot wave theory, corpuscules mark real physical reality, while many worlds accepts that the wavefunction itself is the primary and really sole elementary constituent of physical reality.
Another difference is the guiding equation in pilot wave theory. Many worlds doesn’t need it because the evolution of the wavefunction alone only needs the Schrodinger equation.
This guiding equation presents its own issues. The main one is that it needs to know about not just the corpuscle in question, but also every other corpuscle connected to it via entanglement. It needs this to ensure that all corpuscles are always funneled into the one “real” world.
This means that the Guiding Equation is explicitly non-local, causing instantaneous interactions between corpuscles across arbitrarily large regions of space. In fact, we now know that it’s impossible for any hidden variable theory, like Pilot Wave Theory, to preserve locality. Because of this no one has managed to make pilot wave theory play nice with special relativity.
However it’s easy enough to make our theory relativistic if we just delete the corpuscles—but then of course we have Many Worlds. Occam’s razor tells us that the simplest explanation is usually the most correct. Don’t add parameters to your model if they aren’t needed.
Some have said that the branching timelines of Many Worlds is an addition that goes against Occam’s razor—but proponents of Many Worlds say that these timelines are a core prediction of raw quantum mechanics. To get rid of them you have to add something: either the collapse of the wavefunction in Copenhagen, or the tagging of the “one true world” with corpuscles in pilot wave theory.
Let’s ask one more question: do any of these interpretations explain the Born rule? We know that Copenhagen just takes it on faith that you need to square the wavefunction to get the probabilities.
Do they fall out more naturally in pilot wave theory or many worlds?
Well, in pilot wave theory the probability of getting a measurement in a particular location depends on the distribution of corpuscles. It turns out that if you start the universe with the corpuscules distributed according to the Born rule—so their density being proportional to the square of the wavefunction—then at all later times they’ll retain that distribution, and so the Born rule will continue to work. But pilot wave theory doesn’t tell us how the corpuscles got distributed that way in the first place.
In many worlds, the probability of recording a particular measurement value is the probability of you finding yourself in a timeline where that value actually happened. So it’s about the density of timelines—how many alternate realities correspond to your measurement.
And the fact is, you CAN recover the born rule with this sort of statistics of alternate worlds. You can calculate the probability of landing in one particular world...
Are Many Worlds & Pilot Wave THE SAME Theory? ... https://youtu.be/BUHW1zlstVk
