Why don't you guys look at the Anthropic Principle as woo?

Started by CrucifyCindy, September 06, 2015, 04:25:51 AM

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josephpalazzo

Quote from: Baruch on September 06, 2015, 06:03:21 PM
This ties in with Feynman's path integral way of doing QM ... which says that while there is only one universe that is observable, it is the sum (integral) of an infinite number of sub-universes which are not (as indeed true for ordinary quantum waves which are not observable themselves, yet impact the observables that are. 

Perhaps there are people who might think that, but Feynman's path integral is anything but that. In the calculations, one considers all paths, true, but each path is multiplied by a phase factor so that those paths that deviates from the classical path are less likely to happen, and  are cancelled by other paths. What remains are those paths very near the classical trajectory. There are no sub-universes in this calculation. Anyway, I have a blog doing all these calculations. For those not of faint-of-heart kind of people, see: http://soi.blogspot.ca/2014/05/path-integral-simplified.html

Baruch

I may visit ... my current review of QM that I am doing for a personal project ... doesn't go as far as that.

The question of relative (local) phase is something the elementary treatments don't ... get into.  And some problems don't require all the bits and pieces of the Fourier analysis.  Feynman himself never mentions universes in that way ... just that there are multiple virtual particle paths that sum to one real particle path .. in the same way that a charged particle is surrounded by a boiling sea of virtual particles that effect in small measurable ways, some of the properties of the particle in question (QED).  Of course Feynman invented himself that way of visualizing a bunch of terms in an infinite series for the numerical calculation of some quantum observable ... but is it literal or just a convenient way to organize the math?
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