Making sense of EPW

[Jeff Bone]

On Tuesday, Apr 29, 2003, at 09:59 US/Central, Russell Turpin wrote:

> EPW is quite a bit richer and more expansive in
> the number of universes there are than MWI. I've
> long been a proponent of MWI, simply because it
> is what the quantum theory says, without all the
> kludgery of wave collapse or giving some special
> ontological status to observers. EPW goes far
> beyond that, on philosophical grounds rather than
> on physics theory. EPW says there is no physics
> theory, except relative to the universes that
> adhere to it. A physics simply subsets universes,
> nothing more.

So we have a level problem, here.  I guess what I would say is that EPW 
is an abstraction of physical theory, based on the assumption that you 
don't prune phase space based on particular constants and laws, you 
merely cluster it around them.  I.e., it doesn't necessarily assume 
that  locally observed constants and laws are in the larger sense 
universal (or meta-universal) --- which IMHO is good scientific bias. 
:-)  Hence it's a meta-physical hypothesis in which various other 
physical theories arise.

But I still think that you're missing an interesting application, here 
--- that being the application of finding principles by which this 
clustering occurs, which (intuitively, I admit that I haven't gone very 
far down this road) lead to a more concrete and useful physical theory 
of whatever constitutes "reality" (or "realities") in a 
macro-cosmological sense.

Evidence to support EPW:  constructing experiments to prove EPW will 
likely be very, very hard.  (By contrast, experiments to prove stock 
MWQM are trivial, conducted by high school students every day, i.e. 
diffraction slit, etc.  Many folks just don't like the ontological 
consequences. ;-)  OTOH, I think certain physical theories (cf. 
T'Hooft's Beables and Changeables, [1] etc.) are pushing generally in 
the direction of a fundamental information-theoretic basis for physics. 
  Similarly, it seems to me that certain maths are pushing towards the 
same point from the opposite direction.  When they meet in the middle, 
at a minimum Occam's Razor, complexity theories e.g. Kolmogorov and 
Chaitin, etc. should be useful in trimming away less-likely 
uber-cosmological information-theoretic physical hypotheses.

It's easy to argue that Champerknowne's is an incredibly simple 
"universal universe generator."  There may be others.  Is anyone aware 
of other numbers which, in their infinite binary expansion, contain all 
other numbers as substrings?

jb

[1] http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/0212095