one espresso, many worlds

I walk up to a fully automated coffee dispenser and push the button to get an espresso.
What I do not know is that the button is connected to a device which consists of a radioactive source and a detector. The button activates the detector for 5 seconds and if it registers a particle from the radioactive material it will make an espresso and otherwise not (*). The probability to get my espresso, according to text book quantum theory, is exactly 50%.



But this raises the following question. There are many ways I can get the espresso, but there is only one way that it can fail. See, I push the button at 1pm, which here means I push it exactly at 1:00:00. Now the detector could register a particle at 1:00:01 or at 1:00:02 or ... at any time between 1:00:00 and 1:00:05. There is an infinite number of possibilities when and how the detector could register a particle.

But there is only one way it can not register a particle, with the detector shutting down at 1:00:05.

Since we all believe in the many worlds interpretation, this implies that there are many worlds where an espresso has been prepared and only one world where I fail to get it. So how can the probability be 50%?

Unless we assume that somehow the many different worlds are not equally real (x).



So perhaps the many worlds are not really real after all ?





(*) Actually, many automated dispensers in the real world follow a similar design.



(x) added later: There are proposals on how to save the appearances. Let me know if you find them convincing.

weird comments

Something is weird with the comments to this blog. Now I receive spam (e.g. to the previous entry) which I cannot delete (*). And the comment counters are sometimes messed up too.

So I decided to disable comments (again) and recommend that you do not click on links in comments which consist mostly of strange characters.





(*) Why send spam to a blog which is mostly inactive ?!





update: Meanwhile, it seems that the delete finally worked and I am turning comments back on.

triangles

In a recent preprint Renate Loll et al. present numerical evidence that causal dynamical triangulation is eventually a discretization of Horava-Lifshitz gravity.

But is this really good news?

In an earlier paper by Christos Charmousis et al. an argument was given that "the original Horava model, and its 'phenomenologically viable' extensions do not have a perturbative General Relativity limit at any scale". Lubos wrote more about that at the time and there is also this paper with a more general argument.

I am neither an expert on CDT nor Horava-Lifshitz gravity and would welcome comments about this. (Of course, I always welcome comments!)

friends

One reason I do not have a facebook account is that I would probably not have enough friends; Most likely my friends would on average have more friends than I do.

This is just another result of this 'mutant form of math' and is explained e.g. here and here (pdf).



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Adrian Kent thinks that many worlds interpretations are scientifically inadequate.

He is against many worlds.



In this world.

I wonder what he thinks in the other worlds...



And I wonder if I have on average more friends in the other worlds than in this.

By the way, can a whole world have 'friends'? (*).





(*) Friends have to have something in common. So we define that two different worlds or branches of the m.w.i. are 'friends' if they both contain at least one observer with (almost) the same conscious experience. At any point in time we are then dealing with a 'social network' of worlds and the above friendship paradox applies: Most likely the other worlds will have more 'friends', be more popular, than our world.
If I believe in the many minds interpretation and assume that conscious experience constitutes reality, does this mean our world is most likely less real than others?