I have a very hard time explaining how changing a second can completely change everything. Anyone know any articles that prove or disprove this claim?
i’m not quite sure what you mean, but logically, every second that passes on earth leads to a completely new set of events, even if things just change a little tiny weeny bit, like by moving to new positions, etc. Also, please note the snow-ball effect. If in one second an atomic giga bomb or whatever explodes the planet everything does change within one second.
sorry, I can help you better if I know exactly which context it is that you are placing the second in///
your completely correct, but when i try to explain it to these people (my stupid family) they think im talking about metaphysics. i need a good example. Like: If my uncle died 20 years ago I wouldn’t have existed, even though he is not my father. They think I’m crazy, and I think they are stupid
From that, could I say, that every second(or any “event” occurs), one world/dimension/universe is “destroyed” while another is continued on from the previous event?.
An interesting thing i thought up… And i agree with your point of “completely new set of events thing”
You could try using a more direct example, one of the classical paradoxes: let us suppose that you go back in time and kill your grandfather. How could you then be born?
And if they agree that this illustrates your point, then you can go on to the paradox: if you are never born, how could you go back in time and kill your grandfather? Which means you are born and go back in time to kill your grandfather . . .
Yeah, if you went back in time and killed yourself, it wouldn’t have happened, so it just isn’t possible:
(excerpt):
“There is an important theorem on time travel due to biochemist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Asimov’s theorem states that it is impossible to travel back in time and has a proof similar to some of the proofs in mathematics. Take as a premise that you could travel back in time. You do so, find yourself at an earlier age, and kill yourself, or, if you were not yet born, kill your parents or an entire generation of your ancestors. That clearly would preclude your existence in the present and it would be impossible for you to have done what you did. Since the premise can lead to a ridiculous conclusion, it must be false. That is not to say you can’t travel into the future. We all do it every day, but at a very slow rate.”
Imagine history as a sculpture. Take a chink out of that sculpture, and it still exists, but not as it did.
Magnify this to become the history of hundreds of people. Remove one of them, and the change is much greater. Our beautiful chunk of stone still exists, but it may be so dissimilar to its former self that it no longer qualifies as it.
Well, that assumes that time is a single linear flow. There are multiple timeline hypotheses that allow paradoxes like this to occur – if you kill yourself at an earlier stage, a new timeline splits off the main one and in the new timeline you cease to exist – but your originating timeline continues undisturbed. It’s a consequence of Wheeler-Everett “Many Worlds” hypothesis.
Nothing is ever simple!
I love this sort of thing. I dont think that the example of your uncle would work though, unless of course your father was too caught in grief to have fathered you. otherwise it might only affect your childhood and upbringing, but then I’m not sure.
I have allways heard of three classic rules of paradox, in any case when you go back to change the past and would have prevented your origional journey. one was that it would create a new timeline that exsisted paralell to your own. Two was that what ever you did in the past you had allready done and so nothing changes. Three was that you would simply fade from exsistance and time would continue on on the course you had set it to.
those are classic examples of a paradox, as far as I know at least.
as far as the snowball ar Butterfly effect goes, the effects become more drastic the further they go down. 20 years very little change, 50 years big changes possible, over 100 years could cause changes so dramatic as to change human evolution.
Peace
When you travel through time, you’ve already separated yourself from the timeline, so how could changes in the past affect you, anyway? Someone else would have to do it.
From that, could I say, that every second(or any “event” occurs), one world/dimension/universe is “destroyed” while another is continued on from the previous event?.
Philosopher Henri Bergson once imagined that existence happens as a series of images/events that are flashed very quickly one after another, there is not a continous stream of them and one does not follow from the other. Compare it to a huge amount of photo’s that flash so quickly that you think you are seeing a movie. So maybe a new universe is created as every “flash” lives itself out.
Is there any evidence that any of these hypotheses aren’t just whimsical flights of fantasy?
I mean, “Many Worlds” is unmeasurable, unfalsifiable, and basically unscientific, right?
Although it says here that “nearly 60% (of scientists) thought many worlds interpretation was ‘true’”:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
That’s a very strange thing to say, in the first place because the Hypothesis is an organizing principle, not a factual statement, but also because the Many Worlds Hypothesis is exactly as much a “whimsical flight of fantasy” as is the linear hypothesis – and no less. “Is all how you look at it.”
The point is, nobody knows, so speculations are legitimate – and the Wheeler-Everett Hypothesis has the advantage that it eliminates a category of paradox so it is therefore a “better” theory than other theories which allow paradoxes. It also embraces a larger framework than the linear-time theory and so is “better” in that sense also.
Paradoxes are typically signs that the descriptive theory has some inaccuracy or inadequacy. The underlying assumption is that reality, being a non-contradictory whole, does not have paradoxes, and so if we want out descriptive theories to represent reality then the elimination of paradoxes is a Good Thing.
My apologies if I’m being unsympathetic or insensitive. It’s not intentional. I’m just asking “is there any evidence?”.
For me, it’s like someone saying, “elves control sub-atomic particles”; I naturally respond with a “you’re kidding right?”-type of question. 
So maybe the Many Worlds theory has a lot of supporters, but I am probably with the 40 percent who think it is untrue (referring to my earlier post).
I imagine that scientists don’t like un-answered questions. I think the lack of answers for quantum physics wears the psyches of scientists down to be more willing to accept far fetched theories. It might help them sleep at night. 
Again, no harm intended. This is just what I think.
On a side note: Isaac Asimov wrote a book using the Many Worlds theory to the extreme called “The Gods Themselves…”. It won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for science fiction when it came out.
Yes, I read the book when it came out. I don’t recall it specifically used Wheeler-Everett, though – another of the multiple universe theories, perhaps. Parallel dimensions has been kicked around in physics (and therefore in science fiction) for a very long time – going back to the turn of the 20th century at least, and JMDunne’s serial time theories kicked off a lot of speculation in the 1920’s (and generated some excellent science fiction from, inter alia, Robert Heinlein and H. Beam Piper.
The point it, it is nonsensical to ask if there is any evidence for Wheeler-Everett, because there is no evidence for any of these theories, including the “commonsense” notion of linear time that generates the paradoxes. If there is no evidentiary reason to privilege any of these theories, it makes no sense to “believe” one (i.e., the linear time hypothesis) over the other – except that, as I mentioned earlier, Wheeler-Everett gets rid of the paradoxes of the linear time theory, which is sufficient reason to privilege that theory over the naive linear time theory. It’s not particularly “far-fetched”; it’s just unfamiliar and therefore counter-intuitive.
OK, I have a question:
How could a particle exist in more than one reality simultaneously?
By this I mean, well, for example, let’s blow the particle up to the size of an object we can manipulate; say, an orange.
If the orange is sitting in a bowl on a table in one universe, could it be in a different location in the alternate universe? Say, in the back seat of a car?
The point of my question is to ask whether the theory allows for such separation of the objects in different locations, or if the thoery is more that the object exists in only one location, but the alternate universes somehow “spiral”(?) around it?
Either definitions seem to offer arguable problems. I’d appreciate any help.
Thanks!
Well it’s not the “same” particle; it’s a counterpart particle. There are many possible explanations – and, again, no particular reason to privilege one explanation over another.
I just went ahead and started a new thread on “Many Worlds”. Thanks. 