Dork Scratchings

Clockwise from top left: Occam, Deutsch, Everett, and Dirac Occam's razor The anthropic principle Forward reasoning Lack of any consistent alternative 1. Occam's razor Hugh Everett's 1956 thesis The Theory of the Universal Wavefunction opens with a mathematical summary of the then widely accepted Copenhagen Interpretation. "... there are two fundamentally different ways in which the state function can change:    Process 1:  The discontinuous change brought about by the observation of a quantity with eigenstates $\phi_1, \phi_2,...,$ in which the state $\psi$ will be changed to the state $\phi_j$ with probability $\lvert(\psi,\phi_j)\rvert^2$. Process 2: The continuous, deterministic change of state of the (isolated) system with time according to a wave equation $\frac{\partial \psi}{\partial t} = U\psi$, where $U$ is a linear operator." The 1st process is commonly known as the "collapse of the wavefunction" and ...

A review of Our Mathematical Universe (Max Tegmark) Our Mathematical Universe was my summer holiday reading this year.  But it turned out to be much more than just something to keep me occupied while lounging on the beach.  This book has changed my conception of reality.  The themes in the book are similar in nature to those in The Fabric of Reality by David Deutch - another one of my favourite books.  However, instead of restricting the argument to the parallel universes predicted by Everett's Universal Wavefunction, Tegmark takes us on a tour of four levels of multiverse.  More than this, he provides an overarching theoretical framework for understanding them based on what he calls "the A-word" (because using its full name is guaranteed to get your paper rejected). The argument goes like this.  Whenever we find Nature appears finely tuned to make self-aware life possible, then there are 3 possible explanations It's a fluke! It's design! (by a...