1 HN user recommended this explainer1 month2020–2025score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
Recommended as an accessible explanation of many-worlds versus single-world wave collapse.
Veritasium explains the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, drawing heavily on Sean Carroll's book. It walks through the Schrodinger equation and why wave collapse may be unnecessary if the universe keeps splitting.
“Veritasium has a great video that explains the concept of parallel worlds vs wave collapse in a single world” (HN, 2020)
As the parent comment says, everything in physics depends on how you observe ("... best described"). Like Sean Carroll said in the Veritassium video about the "many worlds" [1], there's no such such thing as "pressure", it is just the interaction of fluid molecules. For practical purposes though, it is best described as a scalar called "pressure". [1] [this video]
Sean Carroll's point that pressure is just a useful description.
People want and need to learn about science from sources they trust because actually parsing through a scientific paper critically (as a peer reviewer would do) is very hard and is likely only to leave you with more questions while providing an incredibly narrow kind of knowledge. What interests me is the politics of it. A paper in a vacuum is nothing. How do people really convince each other of the importance of one argument or observation over another? How do those arguments grow to the scale of a whole society? Science at the scale of society doesn't happen in the language of scientific papers, but rather in rhetoric: in appeals to what the Greeks categorized as Ethos (Emotion), Pathos (Authority), and Logos (Logic). At its most brilliant this is "Schroedinger's cat," which in two words encodes in our collective consciousness an appeal to logic which entreats us through contradiction to consider a philosophically meaningful set of ideas about the nature of reality. (shoutout: [this video] )
Shoutout to the video as good science communication.
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