Bohm's Interpretation is experimentally indistinguishable from MWI.
On the other hand, Bohm's interpretation seems pretty ad hoc. And it also includes all of the other worlds that MWI has in it via the pilot waves that continue to exist and propagate forever. (The pilot waves never collapse.) It's just that only one of those many worlds ends up being "real".
Yes, Bohmian mechanics seems like MW with added complications, all the “worlds” still exist. It’s not clear how it is ontologically different from MW, other than that painting one of the worldlines green.
What I don't follow with the ideas about MWI is the idea of discrete universes at all. Why would one not be able to perceive the entire subset of universes in which one can exist? (in which you were born, didn't get hit by a bus, etc)
Necessarily, this lesser infinity of universes would tend to be extremely similar, and would average out to some kind of consensual reality, with the variation noise only becoming evident if one looked very closely (superposition, casimir effect, uncertainty principle, etc)
So the act of observation would merely divide this lesser infinity into two lesser infinities which would be distinct unless they were reunited by a reverse-time coherence such as many quantum experiments have demonstrated.
I would suspect that statistically, such reverse-time coherences are pretty common inside of one's personal light cone, so in this respect, I would guess that the "universe bandwidth" is probably quite robust and requires a pretty significant (macroscopic scale) effect in order to divide permanently into distinct infinities for a given observer.
Of course this is all just metaphysical conjecture, but Id be interested if anyone is seriously thinking along similar lines.
When I was a kid, I once brought a stethoscope with me on the airplane so that I could watch the movie for free. (Or rather listen to it.) I pulled off the heart-listening cup part of the stethoscope and inserted beverage straws into the rubber tubing. Then I put one straw into each of the two little holes in the armrest.
It worked perfectly! Until a stewardess caught me and made me stop.
Sounds ingenious but I don’t quite follow the story. Why would a stewardess make you stop? Was there some system where you had to pay for headphones separately to hear a movie? I’m pretty sure all I remember are headrests having standard 1/8” audio jacks.
Yes, they would charge for headphones to watch the movie. The movie (there was only one, or maybe two on a long international flight) was played on CRT monitors mounted on the ceiling of each cabin section.
That was 20+ years ago, before flat panel screens in every headrest that could tune into one of a couple dozen looping channels, and long, long before you could watch anything at any time from a huge library.
No, they had holes that sounds came out of and the headphones were just long tubes plugged into the hole to convey the sound to your ear. Like the article. They'd rent the headphones to you.
My uncle was a professional gambler and did well at it. At first he counted cards playing Blackjack, but eventually was banned from most casinos where it was actually possible to win at Blackjack. (Casinos in Atlantic City aren't allowed to ban card counters, so they use huge decks and shuffle frequently to make winning via card counting infeasible.)
He mostly switched at some point to betting on sports. He arbitraged the odds that the bookies used compared to odds that were apparently more accurate, probabilistically.
I asked him how he could possibly have a better sense of the probabilities than the bookies, whose job it is to get this right. He replied that the bookies don't set the odds based on probabilities, but rather just so that they have an equal amount of money on both possible outcomes, and therefore they would always make money no matter what.
So the odds that the bookies used were often not good measures of the actually probabilities, but rather often more a measure of public sentiment. And he could take advantage of this difference.
Please do get started. This sound like an awesome story! (For HN, that is, maybe not so much for dinner parties).
Just thinking about the thought process you had is entertaining in my end, because my procrastinating self would have delayed the part about going into the ceiling as the last possible resort... So what evidence was strong enough that you figured there must have been something wrong with a particular cable, or all cables, and just a specific section?
That particular section of ethernet, which served about half of a floor of an entire building was intermittent. It would work the vast majority of the time, but would have mysterious periodic outages, depending on the phase of the moon, or other mysterious cosmic events.
Working at a university, no one would pay for me to have a time domain reflectometer (aka TDR), which would have helped determine if there was a bad spot in the Ethernet cable somewhere.
One of the assistant directors of the lab told me that I didn't need a TDR, because I could just diagnose the problem with a signal generator and an oscilloscope. (Which is what a TDR basically is, but just bundled up to be convenient to use.) I ended up doing just that, and was able to determine that there was a reflection happening on that section of Ethernet cable, but IIRC, narrowing down the location relied on me having more knowledge than I had about the speed of light in an RG-58 cable. And also, wheeling around a working with the oscilloscope was a PITA.
Eventually I found someone to loan me a real TDR, and was able to determine how far down the cable the problem was occurring. Of course, even with that knowledge, determining where the problem was occurring was a challenge, since the cable snaked in a out of everyone's offices.
I followed the cable, applying the TDR at various points, until I got close to where the reflection was occurring, and it seemed to be occurring where the cable ran through the ceiling for a while.
I should note that all while I'm doing this, people are griping heavily, since it required disconnecting that section of Ethernet, meaning that people couldn't get their work done.
In any case, I got a ladder, pried up some ceiling tiles, looked up into the ceiling, and found a section of the Ethernet cable that had been spliced. At first I figured that one of the splices was bad, but eventually I noticed that the cable that had been spliced in was RG-59.
In case you don't already know, RG-58 and RG-59 look almost identical to each other. IIRC, the only real way to tell the difference was by reading the print on the cable.
Whoever spliced in that piece of cable should be drawn and quartered, but once I replaced that bit of cable with RG-58, everything then worked fine from then on, with no more intermittent outages.
On the other hand, Bohm's interpretation seems pretty ad hoc. And it also includes all of the other worlds that MWI has in it via the pilot waves that continue to exist and propagate forever. (The pilot waves never collapse.) It's just that only one of those many worlds ends up being "real".