Does entanglement violate special relativity?

[nikman]

Max Tegmark is a Many Worlder, I think. He has written articles on parallel universes. Addressing your comments:

From a factual viewpoint, this does not appear to be accurate based on what we currently know. ... There are parts of the universe that have never been in causal contact with us. ... Are virtual particles evolving according to these same deterministic laws?

I don't think you are saying that you are advocating a deterministic viewpoint, but I just wanted to get clarification.

He's a "many-minder" along with Dieter Zeh. Same difference as far as I can tell, and then some.

He stated the initial conditions bit explicitly, and probably not for the first time, in his 1996 paper "DOES THE UNIVERSE IN FACT CONTAIN ALMOST NO INFORMATION?" which he still links to from his website. No alteration, no repudiation. We can assume he at least doesn't consider it outmoded.

Causal contact isn't the issue, apparently. It's all about universal entanglement. It seems deeply deterministic (in the sense that the Schrödinger equation is deterministic) but not I think as uncompromisingly deterministic as 't Hooft's determinism. The randomness component seems to be genuinely quantum stochastic, not some hidden pseudo-randomness originating down at the Planck length amid the foam.

Tegmark's pal Dieter Zeh's analogy (he uses it as a metaphor for teleportation) is the Grimm's tale "The Hare and the Hedgehog". Mrs. Hedgehog at the top of the row, Mr. Hedgehog at the bottom, unpacking their pre-arranged plot. No causal contact between them, pure kinematics, just the hare running back and forth until he drops dead. I guess that's the universe, unpacking itself per initial conditions evolved through an algorithm.

There's a Deutschian component there too, the Universe as Computer, common to almost all many-whatevers. I've never understood why you'd need all those universe-worlds to store information. If you want to go total informationalist I like Hans C. von Baeyer's peeled-grape uncollapsed qubit. It's all in there, right here in this unparalleled world-universe, all the goodies anyone could ever want, if we could only decipher it. But we can't. "All we get is one lousy [classical] bit," as von Baeyer says.

No, I don't buy the Tegmarkian universe. But would I stake my life on its being bogus? No.

So, re: debra's idea: I do believe in the possibility of larger domains of entanglement beyond simply that of any two or three or however many defined correlated particles. Entanglements within entanglements, correlation sets within correlation sets. So the actions of any entangled pair wouldn't necessarily just be reflective of their own immediate correlations. But maybe you'd only discover that if you were actually able to isolate the particles, as in a hypothetical two-particle universe. Also it seems like a two-particle universe wouldn't be equivalent as a relativistic entity to the one we know. So at the moment I'm inclined to think the idea may have problems.

 

[Dmitry67]

There's a Deutschian component there too, the Universe as Computer, common to almost all many-whatevers. I've never understood why you'd need all those universe-worlds to store information. If you want to go total informationalist I like Hans C. von Baeyer's peeled-grape uncollapsed qubit. It's all in there, right here in this unparalleled world-universe, all the goodies anyone could ever want, if we could only decipher it. But we can't. "All we get is one lousy [classical] bit," as von Baeyer says.

Max Tegmark denies it, he says that we are NOT emulated and no computer is need

 

[nikman]

Max Tegmark denies it, he says that we are NOT emulated and no computer is need

Okay. I know he says that every true mathematical statement gets physically realized in some universe within the multiverse, so there must be at least one universe in which Turing Machines can't exist due to conflicts with other conceivable mathematics. He says that, more or less anyway, in one of his papers.

I tend to conflate him with Nick Bostrom sometimes. Their relationship goes all the way back to Sweden and they've written at least one paper together. Bostrom is notorious for pushing the idea that we may well be living in a computer simulation. Any material you can cite where Tegmark specifically disputes that approach would be appreciated.