Quantum Suicide and Immortality

Quantum Suicide And Immortality

In quantum mechanics, quantum suicide is a thought experiment. It was originally published independently by Hans Moravec in 1987 and Bruno Marchal in 1988 and was independently developed further by Max Tegmark in 1998. It attempts to distinguish between the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and the Everett many-worlds interpretation by means of a variation of the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, from the cat's point of view. Quantum immortality refers to the subjective experience of surviving quantum suicide regardless of the odds.

Keith Lynch recalls that Hugh Everett took great delight in paradoxes such as the unexpected hanging. Everett didn't mention quantum suicide or quantum immortality in writing, but his work was intended as a solution to the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. Lynch said "Everett firmly believed that his many-worlds theory guaranteed him immortality: His consciousness, he argued, is bound at each branching to follow whatever path does not lead to death", Tegmark explains, however, that life and death situations don't normally hinge upon a sequence of binary quantum events like those in the thought experiment.

Read more about Quantum Suicide And Immortality:  Quantum Suicide Thought Experiment, Max Tegmark's Work, Criticism, In Fiction

Famous quotes containing the words quantum, suicide and/or immortality:

    The receipt to make a speaker, and an applauded one too, is short and easy.—Take of common sense quantum sufficit, add a little application to the rules and orders of the House, throw obvious thoughts in a new light, and make up the whole with a large quantity of purity, correctness, and elegancy of style.
    Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)

    Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.
    Ezra Pound (1885–1972)

    Immortality is what nature possesses without effort and without anybody’s assistance, and immortality is what the mortals must therefore try to achieve if they want to live up to the world into which they were born, to live up to the things which surround them and to whose company they are admitted for a short while.
    Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)