Barbour's The Janus Point

Has anyone found this as interesting as Sean Carroll?

A different Richard Watson than the one I was looking for, wants to spend an hour considering the myth of decoherence, a subject that’s apparently quite relevant to a janus point… “if the boundary condition is not objective for environmental decoherence then you have to talk about observer relative quantum states.”

I didn’t watch the entire video, but this is a direction I see the future conversation going

This is all definitely intriguing given the relativity between a janus point in the “distant” past and it being in the present

I am immediately skeptical of any popular science book that is recommended by Sean Carroll.

Recommended reading:

Comprehensive Reviews Parts III and IV: From Eternity to Here And to the Big Picture

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Well I do appreciate the recommendation. Do you have any opinion of Craig and Smith’s book Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity?

Not even aware of it! I guess that’s a no. :wink:

Here’s Quentin Smith considering how an instant of time causes another instant. I find it curious as I would talk about how one event can lead to another event and the immediate effect of an uncaused cause will appear to come from nothing.

“There’s no room for God to create the first state because there is no first state.” For Smith ‘state’ means instant of time in this quote.

The only myth I see is the idea that decoherence is any different than a wave collapse. There are essentially the same thing with the idea that the discontinuity can be removed.

If decoherence really depended on a human distinction between the system and the environment then I would totally agree that it makes no sense. But I don’t think so. I think his criticism only has to do with a particular presentation of decoherence this guy saw or read. But I think decoherence is just a function of the number of particles involved. You get decoherence when the number of particle entangled in the quantum state becomes very high. The discontinuity disappears as the different parts of the superpositions merge in the entangled states as the number of particles increases (which happens exponentially).

As I have said many times, the observations referred to in quantum physics are measuring devices and the involvement of conscious observers is completely irrelevant since they have no effect on the experiments whatsoever.

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