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Comment by JonnieCache | Hacker News Reader

If you want some really wacky stuff, try this: The Multiverse Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics - Leonard Susskind and Raphael Bousso

http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.3796

By the way, this ain't your daddy's multiverse. This is a whole new and extended multiverse theory which says that the multiple universes used to explain tuning of constants and the multiple universes used to explain quantum decoherence are THE SAME THING!

Then, for balance read this guy who thinks they're on crack:

http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/05/bousso-susskind-hypermulti...

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It's also useful I think to link to Tegmark's sorta-famous Multiverse Hierarchy.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0905.1283

Motl thinks everybody is on crack.

This is true. And he's a birther, and a heavy climate change skeptic. His writing about physics is refreshing though.

Is Motl famous? I've seen his name popup everywhere physics related. Should I know him?

He was in the Society of Fellows at Harvard, and is an extremely prolific, opinionated blogger. He and Peter Woit over at Not Even Wrong used to feud constantly.

Interestingly, Motl is actually really polite and charming in a shy, goofy way in person.

"Even in classical physics, dice may have probabilities 1/6 for each number, but once we see "6", we update the probabilities to (0,0,0,0,0,1)."

It is obvious that he himself is on crack. I couldn't read past that gibberish.

That is a correct reasoning. In classical physics, as everything is predetermined, no real probabilities exist. We use probability theory to gauge our uncertainty about the world.

If you knew the position of every particle in the dice, there would be no distribution of side, it would always come up the same. But we don't and can't know everything, thus we use probabilities to express that. If you throw the dice, your uncertainty drops because you know the outcome of the experiment.

Yes, but is he assuming that all initial conditions are known when it hits 6 while also assuming classical theory? If he is, fine. If he isn't, he updated wrong.

Isn't this just saying that any number has a chance of 1/6th for being "it" before the dice is rolled, and that once we have rolled the dice and it landed with 6 on top, the number 6 obviously has a probability of 1 of being "it"?

Except, of course, the string theorists...

How about some really, really wacky (and extremely fascinating) stuff: Quantum Immortality

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality

If you want a totally different competing, (and compelling) hypothesis to soak up, try these- http://www.electric-cosmos.org/indexOLD.htm

http://www.haltonarp.com/articles

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