Talk:Universal wavefunction

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[edit] Criticism

I don't know what Ray Streater's exact rationale is for his criticism, but to me the universal wavefunction is meaningless because it purports to say something about the totality of existence, which is a concept that abuses the logic of universal quantification. I do think Everett's relative state idea is brilliant though. It handles the Wigner's friend gedankenexperiment in a very elegant way. But extending the wavefunction to include everything is asking for trouble. To paraphrase Streater: What is the universal wavefunction a function of? --Shastra 11:14, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Denying the existing of a universal wavefunction makes as much sense (to me) as denying the existence of a classical universe. The universal wavefunction is a function of the same things as other wavefunctions are. --Michael C. Price ^talk 11:57, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Even classical universes can run into problems if we aren't careful about unobservable entities and infinities... Examples of ordinary wavefunctions are functions on Fock spaces that describe the quantum fields that have been observed in our universe. In the many-worlds picture that last phrase should be translated into: the quantum fields that have been observed in our current branch of the many-worlds. Is the universal wavefunction also limited to these Fock spaces? If that is the case, then (to paraphrase Everett) why draw the line there? --Shastra 15:44, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Obviously we can only describe the operation of that part of the wavefunction we know about -- again, the same situation that existed with classical physics. Broader speculations are outside the scope of many-worlds and the universal wavefunction, with its extended Fock spaces or whatever emerges from a TOE, but may be discussed within the arena of the Multiverse (science). --Michael C. Price ^talk 17:47, 22 August 2006 (UTC)