So here we come finally to the quantum suicide booth. I'm getting rid of the "instrumentalism vs realism" title now because I think we've strayed far enough from the original topic that this is pretty tangential. Truth be told, that whole series ended up being a lot of tangential stuff and not a whole lot directly related to the debate between ( Read more... )

I realized after writing part 5 that by continuing on to the anthropic principle and observer selection effects, I've skipped over a different issue I planned to write more about, which was how statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics are actually the same thing. I think I actually covered most of what I'd wanted to cover in part 4, but then ( Read more... )

I wrote two posts in January of this year ("instrumentalism vs realism" and "instrumentalism vs realism part 2") and wrote "to be continued..." at the end of part 2. The main point of both of them was really to voice my thoughts on the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, to see if I could make any sense of it, and to compare it to the ( Read more... )

When I wrote part 9 I was thinking I was pretty confused and I was not sure I had really made any progress on answering the basic question that I had set out to answer with this series. But I'm pleased to announce that within 24 hours after writing that one, I started thinking and piece by piece, it just all came together. I think I have pretty ( Read more... )

I have to admit, in trying to tie all of this together, I have realized that there still seems to be something big that I don't understand about the whole thing. And there is at least one minor mistake I should correct in part 8. So from here on out, we're treading on thin ice, I'm doing something more akin to explaining what I don't understand ( Read more... )

In parts 2 through 5 I explained a bit about how wandering sets and thermodynamics works. And in part 6 I explained a bit about how quantum mechanics works. Now we can begin to bridge the gap and see how the two different angles from which I've been approaching this question intersect ( Read more... )

First, a quick comment about something pretty basic that I completely forgot to mention in part 4 on the "Boltzmann's brain" paradox: why do they call it Boltzmann's brain? Seems obvious I should have explained this, but it's because the type of dilemna raised by it is similar to the "brain in a vat" thought experiment that philosophers of ( Read more... )

Our universe has 3 large spacial dimensions (plus one temporal dimension, and possibly another 6 or 7 microscopic dimensions if string theory is right, but those won't be of any importance here ( Read more... )

There's a connected set of issues that rests at the very heart of physics, which I've always thought was not very clearly explained in any of my classes. I had a very vague understanding of it while I was an undergrad, and hoped that I'd be able to sharpen it up in graduate school. To some extent, I did, but I found that even after 6 years of ( Read more... )

Man, I really wish I had time to read this it looks very interesting. But so ballsy and seemingly "too good to be true" that it's probably wrong. They're basically arguing that the String Theory multiverse (also known as the Cosmic Landscape, or the megaverse, or the eternal inflation multiverse, or simply the multiverse to string theorists) is ( Read more... )