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Mongol invasion of Russia + How many worlds theory of Hugh Everett split the universe

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Archaeologists unearth mass graves from Mongol invasion of Russia: . . . In the first half of the 1200s, Mongol leader Batu Khan (the grandson of Genghis Khan) conquered parts of modern-day Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Caucasus, adding them to what became known as the Golden Horde. He swept westward with an army of 130,000 soldiers, and for the cities in his path, the only options were surrender or slaughter. Smolensk opted to surrender and pay tribute to the Khanate, but 18 other cities—including Moscow and the capital of the principality that, at the time, ruled Yaroslavl—fell to fire and the sword.

The Mongol army reached Yaroslavl in February 1238. Many of the people buried in the mass graves afterward had clearly died violently; their bones carried the marks of stabbing, cutting, and blunt trauma. Some of the bones also showed signs of having been burned, probably in the fire that accompanied the attack, according to historical documents and archaeological evidence. Several of the graves had been the basements of houses and outbuildings; after the buildings burned down in the fire, the survivors or the conquerors found the exposed basements convenient places to dispose of the dead.

On the grounds of a medieval estate in the center of town, near the cathedral, someone went to the trouble to dig a pit for the dead. But the fifteen people buried in the shallow pit lay in a variety of poses, suggesting that they had been dumped in unceremoniously. The blowfly larvae found mingled with the bones might explain that hasty treatment: the bodies would have been in the smelliest stages of decomposition when burial finally happened.

The larvae remained in remarkably good condition, even after 800 years of burial. Entomologists identified the exact blowfly species—and calculated that around Yaroslavl, the average daily temperatures the larvae would need came in late May or early June.

“These people were killed, and their bodies remained lying in the snow for a fairly long time. In April or May, flies started to multiply on the remains, and in late May or early June, they were buried in a pit on the homestead, which is where they probably had lived,” said archaeologist Asya Engovatova of the Russian Academy of Sciences. By then, Batu Khan and his army were already marching through Crimea. (MORE)

Genes reveal kinship between 3 victims of Mongol army in 1238 massacre: Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Archaeology have used DNA testing to prove close genetic kinship between three individuals buried in a mass grave following the capture of the Russian city Yaroslavl by Batu Khan's Mongol army in 1238. This confirms the hypothesis made by archaeologists and anthropologists after studying the remains of 15 persons interred on a historic estate.

"In addition to recreating the overall picture of the fall of the city in 1238, we now see the tragedy of one family," said Asya Engovatova, deputy director of the Institute of Archaeology, RAS, and head of excavations on the Yaroslavl site. "DNA analysis has shown that there were remains of genetically related individuals representing three generations. Anthropological data suggest these were a grandmother aged 55 or older, her daughter aged 30 to 40 and grandson, a young man of about 20. A fourth member of the family related through the female line was buried in the neighboring mass grave."

"Importantly, these family relations were initially postulated by archaeologists and anthropologists, and then confirmed by genetic data," the scientist added. "This makes our research more evidential and allows us to discuss the 13th-century events and way of life with more certainty." The researchers announced their discovery at the eighth Alekseyev Readings, an international conference held Aug. 26-28 at the Anuchin Research Institute and Museum of Anthropology in Moscow. (MORE)



How the many worlds theory of Hugh Everett split the universe
https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-many-worl...e-universe

EXCERPT (Sean Carroll): . . . .Hugh Everett’s insight was as simple as it was brilliant: accept the Schrödinger equation. Both of those parts of the final superposition are actually there. But they can’t interact with each other; what happens in one branch has no effect on what happens in the other. They should be thought of as separate, equally real worlds. This is the secret to Everettian quantum mechanics. We didn’t put the worlds in; they were always there, and the Schrödinger equation inevitably brings them to life. The problem is that we never seem to come across superpositions involving big macroscopic objects in our experience of the world.

The traditional remedy has been to monkey with the fundamental rules of quantum mechanics in one way or another. The Copenhagen approach is to disallow the treatment of the measurement apparatus as a quantum system in the first place, and to treat wave-function collapse as a separate way the quantum state can evolve. As Everett would later put it: ‘The Copenhagen Interpretation is hopelessly incomplete because of its a priori reliance on classical physics … as well as a philosophic monstrosity with a “reality” concept for the macroscopic world and denial of the same for the microcosm.’

The Many-Worlds formulation of quantum mechanics removes once and for all any mystery about the measurement process and collapse of the wave function. We don’t need special rules about making an observation: all that happens is that the wave function keeps chugging along in accordance with the Schrödinger equation. And there’s nothing special about what constitutes ‘a measurement’ or ‘an observer’ – a measurement is any interaction that causes a quantum system to become entangled with the environment, creating a branching into separate worlds, and an observer is any system that brings about such an interaction. Consciousness, in particular, has nothing to do with it. The ‘observer’ could be an earthworm, a microscope or a rock. There’s not even anything special about macroscopic systems, other than the fact that they can’t help but interact and become entangled with the environment. The price we pay for such a powerful and simple unification of quantum dynamics is a large number of separate worlds.

Even in theoretical physics, people do sometimes get lucky, hitting upon an important idea more because they were in the right place at the right time than because they were particularly brilliant. That’s not the case with Everett; those who knew him testify uniformly to his incredible intellectual gifts, and it’s clear from his writings that he had a thorough understanding of the implications of his ideas. Were he still alive, he would be perfectly at home in modern discussions of the foundations of quantum mechanics.

What was hard was getting others to appreciate those ideas, and that included his advisor. John Wheeler was personally very supportive of Everett, but he was also devoted to his own mentor Niels Bohr, and was convinced of the basic soundness of the Copenhagen approach. He simultaneously wanted Everett’s ideas to get a wide hearing, and to ensure that they weren’t interpreted as a direct assault on Bohr’s way of thinking about quantum mechanics.

Yet Everett’s theory was a direct assault on Bohr’s picture. Everett himself knew it, and enjoyed illustrating the nature of this assault in vivid language. In an early draft of his thesis, he used an analogy of an amoeba dividing to illustrate the branching of the wave function: "[O]ne can imagine an intelligent amoeba with a good memory. As time progresses, the amoeba is constantly splitting, each time the resulting amoebas having the same memories as the parent. Our amoeba hence does not have a life line, but a life tree."

Wheeler was put off by the blatantness of this (quite accurate) metaphor, scribbling in the margin of the manuscript: ‘Split? Better words needed.’ Advisor and student were constantly tussling over the best way to express the new theory, with Wheeler advocating caution and prudence while Everett favoured bold clarity. (MORE - details)

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