Mateus Araújo

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• Commented on Quantum of Nightmares: spoiler time!
  One thing I didn't understand is why the Banks took so long (6 days?) to come back from Hawaii after the kidnapping of the children was noticed. They stayed there for the conference? Was it so important? I expected them...
• Commented on New publication dates (and audiobook news)
  Charlie #2: Thanks for the info! I'm surprised that ebooks can get up to 70%, but probably science fiction readers are keener on newer technologies than most. Maybe the day will come soon when it will be the norm for...
• Commented on New publication dates (and audiobook news)
  I hope I'm not asking anything you're not allowed to talk about, but how relevant are the print editions? Could you give a rough breakdown of digital versus print sales of your books? It seems so quaint to wait for...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  I don't know how much mathematics are you interested in; it can get quite hairy. I think this paper does a good job of being precise without getting bogged down in details. See sections 3 and 4. In a nutshell,...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  Your last sentence is correct: the quantum state includes everything, even position and velocity. For the particles to interfere they must be completely indistinguishable, on the fundamental level. So there wouldn't be interference in your drawing. This is quite hard...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  Many-Worlds is proposed as an interpretation of the formalism of quantum mechanics, where energy is conserved as a fundamental law. You are speculating about some alternative to quantum theory, where energy is not conserved, that would also allow a many...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  There is no creation of mass/energy. I already explained that in my comment 544. Come on, if there were a problem with conservation of energy Many-Worlds would not be taken seriously....
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  Problem? That's just life....
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  There is nothing mystical about this, it comes straight out of the equations. And the reason for that is just statistical: two quantum states can only interfere if they become exactly identical. Easy to do with a single photon or...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  Your mental model of Many-Worlds is a bit off. Different worlds can interfere, but it's extremely rare, and gets rarer as the world-splitting spreads through space. It's like all the air in a room spontaneously gathering in a corner. Technically...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  This is what everyone wants. Directly measuring the force of gravity that a lump of mass exerts in another is extremely difficult. AFAIK the most ambitious proposal in this direction is this paper, that wants to measure the gravitational attraction...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  Unitarity doesn't have anything to do with dimensionality, you can have a 10+1 theory that is unitary (or not). A unitary theory is one that is fundamentally reversible (and linear)....
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  Doing the experiment in a deep space probe would help in isolating it, but still we would need to interfere the whole probe, not only the signal getting back to us. And that is quite hard if the probe is...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  (and Greg 723) The Second Law and decoherence are intimately related. When a computer calculates a+b (and probably the brain as well) it does delete information. By Landauer's principle this information is rejected as heat to the environment, increasing the...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  This is precisely how people propose to do the test: once we have a working quantum computer, use it to simulate a lab doing the measurement, and interfere the two resulting branches. This should be possible to do in the...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  Yes, this is what I'm saying. With the added twist that the Many-Worlds prediction for the experiment is deterministic, so it can be falsified in a single shot, whereas the Copenhagen prediction is not, so it can only be falsified...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  To people wondering about how to test the Copenhagen versus Many-Worlds interpretation: there is the famous Wigner's friend gedankenexperiment. The setup is that you have the friend inside an isolated laboratory, and Wigner outside. The friend then measures some particle...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  He focusses on the claim that consciousness only exist when the thinking is an irreversible process, but this is only possible if the thinking is powered by quantum states and there is a massive amount of decoherence going on with...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  In a trivial sense, every effect is a quantum effect, because everything is made of atoms that obey the Schrödinger equation. Hence the question is not really whether the effect is "truly" quantum, but whether a classical model of it...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  To be fair, Aaronson's proposal works with regular physics, whereas Penrose's require science fiction that would make even Charlie blush. I don't really understand your second paragraph, though. How could Knightian uncertainty help with the halting problem? But your larger...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  Well since you do appreciate my responses I'll write you one ;p Scott's idea, in a nutshell, is that what makes human brains conscious is that they have unknown quantum states in them, and the cognition process amplifies their quantum...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  Actually, I mentioned this idea en passant in 463. The problem with Scott Aaronson's conjecture is that it is explicitly wishful thinking. He proposes it just because it allows one to evade the disturbing philosophical questions, not because he has...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  Replying to a lot of people but nobody in particular. A good classical visualisation for the branching process in Many-Worlds is the delta of a big river, like the Danube. On the large scale, you see that the river separates...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  I'm a bit curious about why are you even interested in my answer, since I'm just regurgitating bullshit and hiding my ignorance behind jargon and appeals to authority. But I'm going to ignore the insults and just answer to what...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  No....
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  You might have gotten the wrong impression from string theory, but you cannot postulate an extra dimension just because you feel like it. Many-Worlds is a well-defined theory, and it is about quantum fields evolving on 3+1 spacetime. Its description...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  I'm afraid I haven't really understood your question, so I can't give an interesting answer. I guess you want to know if gravity in one world can affect another? For the other forces we know this is not the case,...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  I'm getting the impression that Charlie's original criticism applies to this idea of "forward continuity". There is no reason to believe it's true other than religious baggage about some magical spark of life. I think the best case that can...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  I really didn't mean to give this impression. There is no collapse in Many-Worlds. What can happen is interference, which has the effect of destroying some quantum states that become identical, but this doesn't happen with worlds, as they are...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  Some people would take any similarity to the Copenhagen interpretation as an insult =) It is no more mysterious than an electron that is in a superposition of having spin up and spin down occupying no more space than an...