From: John K Clark (johnkclark@fastmail.fm)
Date: Fri Aug 20 2010 - 09:35:49 MDT
On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 1:03 AM, Matt Mahoney <matmahoney@yahoo.com>
wrote:
>"Thanks for the excellent book review."
And thank you for your kind words.
>"One point where I disagree with Everett is the need for an uncountable infinity of universes rather than a countable infinity."
Everett just couldn't get his theory to work with a countable infinite
number of universes, and as far as I'm aware nobody else has managed to
do it either.
>"Everett must have been aware that the observable universe has a finite description length (about 10^122 bits)."
I'd take that figure with a grain of salt, it assumes we know what
happens when things get so small they approach the Planck length of 1.6*
10^32 centimeters, and we really don't. We won't be sure about that
until we have a quantum theory of gravity.
And even if that figure is true it wouldn't preclude an infinity of
worlds of whatever cardinality. Some of those other universes would be
variations on this one but others would have no point of correspondence
to ours at all and be completely different, including having a different
total information content, even an infinite information content.
John K Clark
-- John K Clark johnkclark@fastmail.fm
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