Do you believe there are multiple universes?

I think it's possible but in the best case it would not be infinite ( more like a handful) and it would more then likely be completely unrecognizable to anything we have history wise.


And to keep bringing dead characters back to life, and erasing consequences in storytelling.
It's really only interesting when every verse is completely unique and different. Like ff14.
 
Others are referring to the alternative realities in Everett's interpretation of a quantum measurement, where the world splits in two so that both outcomes of a measurement occur and both parts of the wavefunction, written as a sum, have an interpretation in reality.
The world doesn't split in two. A layman would conclude that the universe is just constantly branching into an exponentially growing tree of all imaginable possibilites, with all of these infinitely many histories diverging from each other, but that isn't what's going on. All these histories are at the same time merging back into each other, interfering with each other. The domain of the wavefunction of a quantum system is the tensor product of the domains of the wavefunctions of its constituent parts. The domain of the universal wavefunction already contains all possible situations, so the flow of probability amplitude into all possible outcomes is the exact same thing as the flow of probability amplitude from all possible histories. Most of that is just Feynman's path integral formulation, which isn't even a matter of interpretation. Everett just points out that the observer is also quantum, and obviously one should consider the bigger quantum system which encompasses the observer, until in the limit you consider the entire universe.

I'd even argue that's not the multiverse, just the plain old universe but with the unintuitive implications of its quantum nature taken fully into consideration.

For the other sense of the word multiverse, where you have different causally disconnected patches with possibly different laws of nature and choices of parameters, we'd have to get into what it even means to say that something exists.

And I guess what most people would assume "multiple universes" means, something like the Mirror Universe in Star Trek, I would say almost certainly not.
 
The world doesn't split in two. [...]
In case you weren't paying attention to my post, I don't adhere to "the" many-worlds interpretation, but here's a quotation from the preface to The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, (with my emphasis):
By virtue of the temporal development of the dynamical variables the state vector decomposes naturally into orthogonal vectors, reflecting a continual splitting of the universe into a multitude of mutually unobservable but equally real worlds, in each of which every good measurement has yielded a definite result and in most of which the familiar statistical quantum laws hold.
That isn't quite what Everett says in his thesis, but that's the most common version of the Everett interpretation used by its adherents today. In fact, every Everettian has a slightly different interpretation, insisting that it is "obvious" and ignoring that other Everettians say something else is also the only "obvious" interpretation.

You can't get many-worlds from the path integral formulation, people who have a Copenhagen-type interpretation have no problem using their "lack of knowledge" point of view for it.

In any case, that was not the point of my post. The point was that two utterly different things are both being called "multiverse" and being wilfully confused with each other by science "popularisers" who claim to be explaining science, but they do nothing of the sort.
Max Tegmark's Increasingly Mystical Multiverse:
At least Tegmark gave a shit back in 2003 about the distinction I mentioned (he calls the two things level I versus level III). I can't forgive him for the rest of his retardation though.
 
Depends on what kind of multiverse we are talking about, if it is something like "infinite universes with infinite possibilities" it will enter in contradictions because this means that there are universes X were its only quality is being like universe Y, but universe Y only quality is being unique among all universes if it is infinite possibilities than X and Y should exist, but if X exists than Y doesn't exist, but if Y exists than X doesn't and if one of the two don't exist than infinite possibilities isn't a thing. I have a feeling that this might have something to do with the Russel's paradox on set theory, but I'm too lazy to look it up.
 
Are you asking this so you can imply that there is an alternate universe where you haven't been molested?
 
Multiverses are just a byproduct of some of the disappointing theoretical physics of the past few decades that randomly got popular.

That said, I might. This sort of ideas helps to soften the sharp edges of my existential dread, somehow.
 
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