X-Message-Number: 8112 Date: 20 Apr 97 12:28:28 EDT From: yvan Bozzonetti <> Subject: CRYONICS Many Worlds: no hope There has been on cryonet, from time to time, some brainstorming about quantum mechanics and particularly about the nonorthodox interpretation known as the many worlds QM. If you are out in that world, may be you are neverthless alive in an alternative world... Yet don't count too much on it: \\ Paper: gr-qc/9703089 From: Adrian Kent <> Date: Mon, 31 Mar 97 20:06:45 BST (24kb) Title: Against Many-Worlds Interpretations Authors: Adrian Kent Comments: 28 pages, with 3 page foreword; LaTeX Journal-ref: Int. J. Mod. Phys. A 5, 1745-1762 (1990) \\ A short foreword has been added for the archive version of this article, which otherwise appears as originally published in 1990, except for the updating of references. The original abstract follows. This is a critical review of the literature on many-worlds interpretations (MWI), with arguments drawn partly from earlier critiques by Bell and Stein. The essential postulates involved in various MWI are extracted, and their consistency with the evident physical world is examined. Arguments are presented against MWI proposed by Everett, Graham and DeWitt. The relevance of frequency operators to MWI is examined; it is argued that frequency operator theorems of Hartle and Farhi-Goldstone-Gutmann do not in themselves provide a probability interpretation for quantum mechanics, and thus neither support existing MWI nor would be useful in constructing new MWI. Comments are made on papers by Geroch and Deutsch that advocate MWI. It is concluded that no plausible set of axioms exists for an MWI that describes known physics. \\ Philosophy is better with a pinch of lanl data... Yvan Bozzonetti. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=8112