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:

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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)
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  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.
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	Philosophy is better with a pinch of lanl data...

		Yvan Bozzonetti.

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