Re: Cyer-Letdown. (Spoilers)

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Agamemnon wrote:
"L. Ross Raszewski" <lraszewski@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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On Mon, 15 May 2006 05:24:21 +0100, Agamemnon
<agamemnon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"The Stainless Steel Cat" <steelcat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
in message news:C08D2593966860A61B@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In article <0oI9g.5362$cu4.1181@trndny09>,
"Sean Huxter" <sean.huxter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Not likely. The divergent point seems to have happened
sometime during the
last great War. I doubt Zeppelins made a huge comeback
after Jackie and Pete
got married,

They could have done.

From a quick look at Google, it seems that helium is
extracted from natural
gas. So if the North Sea was richer in gas than oil, and
Cybus produced a
cheap method of extracting the helium from that gas in the
late 70's, Britain would have the ideal circumstances for
increased airship (not Zeppelin) production; cheap helium,
expensive oil (since there was less of
it) and an already booming airship industry: the
ubiquitous Airship Industries' Skyship 600 made it's
maiden flight in 1984 in our timeline,

The time lines diverged some time after 1982 when the Lion
Sleeps Tonight came out and before 2006 so the ratio of
known gas/oil in the North Sea before 1982 would have been
the same.


Even if we accept that the time lines had to "diverge"
(Which I don't), we still don't know when they diverved.
Had they diverged in 1960, the two universes might still
have been sufficiently similar in 1982 that 'The Lion Sleeps
Tonight' was still recorded.

No they wouldn't. Even if the performers had been born they
would never have met and never formed a band or even recorded
the same arrangement and mix if they had and Mickey/Ricky
would never have been conceived in any case. If JFK had not
been assassinated in 1963 nobody in the world today who was
conceived after November 22 1963 would exist and that includes
people living deep in the rain forests in isolation from the
rest of mankind.

It's an interesting question this.

Let us for a moment suppose that there are a non-infinite
number of universes- but that there is one for every possible
history of the universe
since the Big Bang. We know that at the quantum level the
universe is random- so every time a quantum interaction occurs,
the universe "splits"

There is nothing at all which is random on the quantum level.
Quantum theory follows a predefined set of mathematical laws and
is entirely deterministic. Even if you wait forever the Pauli
exclusion principle will never be violated and so on.

Of course there is. The probabilities are rigorously defined, but
the outcome of any individual observation inherently cannot be
predicted. That's

I think you'll find that it can.

No. There is no way to predict the outcome of any measurement. That
is the very basis of QM!

The outcome of any measurement can be predicted and an expectation
value can be calculated for each possible outcome.

If you fire an individual photon at a pair of perfect slits (in a
perfect system) each photon will interfere with itself and will
appear only at the peaks (but you don't know at which peak it will
actually turn up are at a particular point in time) and will never
appear at any of the troughs in the a diffraction pattern that is
predicted. If you repeat the experiment again and again you will
eventually build up the diffraction pattern from the results at the
detector.



simple diffraction pattern analogous to a sine wave, the height of
the wave
being the probability of a particular photon striking that point. The
"peaks" are thus for want of a better word diffuse. You seem to
think they are hard-edged areas. They aren't. A photon can appear
anywhere across the

I was trying to illustrate to you that in a perfect system you will
not find any photons where the probability for finding them is zero
and there is nothing that you can do to change that. Quantum theory
does not work randomly, it follows fixed mathematical rules. The
maths tells you what to expect and that's what you get. I was trying
to avoid having to write down all the maths and making this thread
inaccessible to most people, but I can see that my simplifications
are no substitute for the theory itself. I suggest that anyone that
wants to fully understand Quantum theory studies the theory on a
mathematical level and not on a popular science level before they
start talking about it.

You see, there you go again with the patronising stuff. And that wouldn't be
so bad if you were correct. But sadly, you've argued yourself into a corner
and can't accept that I fully understand what we are talking about, and you
apparently have a very odd idea of QM.

Will you agree with me that the result of any observation in QM cannot be
predicted in advance? The probabilities of various results can be
calculated, but *not* the actual specific result? If you can lower yourself
to accept that, then we're on the same hymn ***.

You also need to be a big lad and accept that your assertions that quantum
measurements are not random is simply wrong. Go measure the polarity of some
photons, and try to predict the sequence of results you'll get in advance.
You can't. That's fundamentally built into QM. Do you understand Bell's
Theorem?

The original discussion was weather Rose would have been conceived in
the parallel universe even if Mickey was called Ricky. The answer is
no. All of the possible quantum outcomes would lead to the
expectation value of Rose being born to be zero.

There's no way to make that statement with any certainty. You are it seems
stuck with the idea of "branching" universes. But there is no reason that a
universe with a *different history* may not end up in a similar state to our
own. There is also no way to calculate the probability of it, since it would
take incalculable amounts of mathematics to do so.

But let's take a simple example pertaining to this situation. The first
thing we can see is that Mickey != Ricky, they are only vaguely similar.
They seem to have the same ancestors and the same DNA, but other than that
they are quite different. They seem to have lived quite different lives. So
in fact the probability of Ricky comes down to the probability of his
parents' conception of him resulting in the same DNA combination, even if
those parents had sex at a different time and under different circumstances
to Mickey's parents. That's a low probability, but it's higher than zero.
There's a very tiny chance that a couple could have two identical babies
from two different pregnancies. "Nearly zero" is not zero.

The point is, with a sufficient number of universes (and we are talking
incomprhensibly vast numbers here), every unlikelihood will occur. It's much
like the probability of all the molecules in a box of gas spontaneously
ending up in the same corner. Tiny, but if you leave it for googolplexes of
years, it'll happen in the end.

Rose's parents would not have fucked at the right time and the DNA
could never have combined in the right way and the baby evolved to be
Rose. Rose is only Rose because she was born when she was under the
circumstance she was born in.

You're confusing "unlikely" with "impossible" again.

Ian

--
www.jaxtrawstudios.com
science fiction comics with shagging in


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