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This website, the app's visual design, and that old plastic-chromed iPhone all harken back to a simpler time when there were funny one-off apps just for the hell of it.
The time of $1.99 quantum splitters, $0.99 iBeer, and $1.99 Lightsaber apps is long gone. Most of those apps didn't really do anything all that amazing, but looking back on it I think I miss when app stores were flush with "we could use the hardware to do this" rather than "we could get in-app purchases and subscriptions like this"
Not that there wasn't monetization as a goal back then, but just that there was a lot of weird paradigms being experimented on where we now have a solidly 10-year norm instead.
I don't even enjoy surfing the app stores nowadays. Anything resembling fun feels like a trap. Either an app with a hidden agenda, or an attempt to rope you into a subscription. Or some otherwise ad filled jank. Just not fun anymore. That goes for most anything with a CPU, really.
I bought this App when was mentioned by Sean Carroll in one of his talks/podcast about quantum computing. And because of that, I really thought that they did something that was founded in quantum physics. Not that it was really important, but it was cool to say "see, now it's contacting LHC to shot another photon The only think that I'm sorry about is that with every change of iPhone I've lost the track of what Universe I am!
That there-was-a-time was the-brief-moment-when the iPhone app store was a folk art medium.
Popular folk art is dangerous.
So a bureaucracy was built.
On that topic, I can highly recommend a Sci-Fi novella called "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" by Ted Chiang (the movie Arrival is based on one of his other novels). Concerns a device that also splits the universe, but allows a limited amount of information transfer between the two splits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety_Is_the_Dizziness_of_Fr...
Ted Chiang is a great author. Link to the story: https://onezero.medium.com/anxiety-is-the-dizziness-of-freed...
This is my main data backup app. I sleep soundly knowing that after a total HDD crash my data is still safe and sound on a different timeline.
I believe that works just as well without the app.
I've read a terrifying short story about that once. It was about a man that never died. The universe just grew ever more unlikely and absurd around him due to quantum immortality.
Edit: Found it. "Divided by infinity": https://www.tor.com/2010/08/05/divided-by-infinity/
I once wrote up about this thought experiment and some of its variants. I particularly recommend the discussion it generated on Reddit for may interesting viewpoints (link towards the end of the post).
I have been using this for awhile, and am beginning to suspect that it is a hoax, and it is not really being sent to a lab in Geneva.
(Looks at source code, finds HKCD random function..)
The unofficial Android app does an api call: https://github.com/tomicooler/UniverseSplitterUnofficial/blo...
Heh, heh. But of course.
Just my luck to be in the universe where I have an Android and the app is only for iPhone :(
You are in the correct universe: https://github.com/tomicooler/UniverseSplitterUnofficial
There is an official Android app[0], it's linked on the developer's main page[1]—but weirdly enough not on the homepage.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Aerfish.Un... [1] https://www.aerfish.com/
It's not really a problem. I went ahead and split the universe for you. Between options A and B, you are to select option B.
First time I've came across the Universe Splitter was from This American Life with a good layman explanation.
There’s a short story out there about a device that can actually do this and then let you stay in contact with your alternate self for a while to see how things turn out. Fascinating stuff.
There's another short story out there which assumes that when you die in one branched universe, you survive in another. So in your subjective experience, you always survive, no matter how low the chances. But eventually your survival requires stranger and stranger events to occur. After a thousand years, your subjective experience becomes utterly implausible, and yet there you are. But you may not like the universe in which you survive that long. Which is too bad, because you can't subjectively die.
I'll probably remember the title tomorrow, if nobody beats me to it. It was a fairly disturbing story.
There's an underrated TV series about (vaguely) this idea called Counterpart:
IIRC, Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang had one like that.
For the exact opposite of a short story, there is a villain in the web-novel Worm whose power works as a variation of this effect.
"Dear Nia" from exurb1a on YouTube tells a similar story
It seems like retaining the information about all possible universes is kind of nonsensical; the volume of data is just too large.
If we assume that the universe is deterministic inside of itself except for quantum decisions, it seems reasonable to me that a structure on the outside of this universe would perform something like a Monte Carlo tree search (assuming that there is a "success condition" for a universe), and branches are only explored to some depth before being discarded. You could then - if you really had to - backtrack to an earlier known state and start exploring again.
In my general view, it's also likely that consciousness is only projected into branches once it's sufficiently established that they're reasonable to follow (I think consciousness might be expensive).
Some random ranting ...
I think it's much cleaner to assume all possible realities exist - otherwise you have to account for the fact that some do not exist.
Why would there be some possible realities and not others? Much cleaner to assume that all possible realities exist. Then when you ask, why is there not just nothing? You can answer, why would there be nothing rather than something? Is that not a special case? It is a special case and requires a cause to make it nothing rather than something. And so we arrive at the concept of the void. That which is not nothing but rather all potentialities simultaneously. True nothing and everything are very similar. What is the state of maximum disorder? A signal that is completely random. It's algorithmic complexity must be maximal. The program to describe it must be maximal and so within it, it contains all possible machines. All possible constructions, all universes. Nothing is everything and so it is not possible to have nothing, and so the universe exists. QED Where's my Nobel?
Human intuition has been completely inconsistent with observed reality since relativity and QM were conceived. We should use other means to evaluate the Many Worlds idea.
> It seems like retaining the information about all possible universes is kind of nonsensical; the volume of data is just too large.
Do you have to retain all the information? Perhaps a set of quantum events is more like a parameter into a function, and the return value is the universe state corresponding to that history. Yeah there's magical black box handwaving going on there but the point is when we literally have no idea, it's not entirely impossible that the quantum multiverse is sparsely populated and lazy loaded with nothing 'computed' into existence until it has to be.
EDIT: Mind, I'm not saying that it is this way. The validity of my proposal isn't the point. The point is that dismissing Many Worlds on the grounds of "too much information" involves assuming a lot of things we don't actually know.
The "split universes" is the new science fiction that took the world by storm. It is an unproven hypothesis that satisfies the psychological needs of people who want to dream of a world that behaves according to their wishes.
Unless you yourself have a good and detailed understanding of quantum mechanics, and have solved the Schrodinger equation for many different systems, I'd recommend not assuming that the physicists who proposed many worlds did so out of some psychological need to have the universe look like a branching tree.
The true situation is that the Schrodinger equation straightforwardly predicts a proliferation of worlds when you start from a low-entropy state. (Worlds in this interpretation are actually continuous blobs of amplitude, not discrete objects, which is why it makes sense that a partial differential equation like the Schrodinger equation can describe them. The prediction is that blobs will tend to spread out, split into smaller blobs, etc.) Early quantum physicists were disturbed by this, and added a collapse postulate claiming that the wave-function will sometimes spontaneously collapse, resulting in a single, linear world history rather than a branching one. To this day, spontaneous collapse has never been observed in an experiment.
Heh, I made something just like it, https://slitdecision.com/
Disclaimer: I have no background in physics at all. I saw this universe splitter and read "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" (Science-Fiction novella by Ted Chiang - the one mentioned in here), and thought hey that's fun.
So this is a $1.99 coin flipper?
How about a RealityOS with duplicate copies ready to be split. When a user faces an A/B options, realities 2, 3, and 4 can go ahead and execute A, B, and cancel so that when the user makes their choice the winning reality is put in focus and the diffs copied to the rest. You could even hover over a button and watch where it ends up. Like pre-fetching from browsers.
Or when a debugger hits a break point reality 2 can proceed with the execution until you are done investigating.
It could even act like a RAID backup in case a random bit flip causes one reality to crash.
Alas it would be quite wasteful to spend watts on hypotheticals...
Sean Carroll's Royal Institution lecture discussing the many worlds interpretation and using a similar app:
Surely this is what happens to ALL internet packets in room 641A
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
downloading any app (much less using it) results in billions of worlds .....
Reminds me of post on taking both sides of the decision using a qubit: https://tobilehman.com/posts/qubits-multiverse/
This only works if the many-worlds-interpretation is true, which has not been confirmed
Where's the Universe where there's an Android version of this app?
If the single photon simultaneously bounces off the partially-silvered mirror and goes through it, you're not going to get an answer to a binary question from this experimental set-up.
> Within seconds, Universe Splitter© will receive the experiment's result and tell you which of the two universes you're in, and therefore which action to take
if this thing is making my choices for me, then why not skip "the middle man" i.e. me?
I sense a rising humanity motion (like rationalism, or the englightnement or whaterver) towards letting the algorithms make all of our choices. The new absolute monarch is the Algorithm. The Kings are dead, long live the algorithms!?
disclaimer: as tha website is not serious but it does pretend to be, my own comment is also not entirely serious. Often difficult topics are better expressed through fiction (or partial fiction; fiction right now but maybe not later)
I've just bought this because I've never seen it before and it made both me and the wife laugh out loud.
As a pathologic over-thinker, I need a Universe merger app, any suggestions? :)
This is baloney. The photon’s choice and your choice make 4 “universes.”
This looks like a "quantum" coin-tossing machine.
I fail to see the point, even if it is connected to some quantum device; it won't make any difference to me, whether my decision is made on a coin-toss or a wave-function collapse.
I can't imagine anyone using this app more than once.
Fun idea, but "according to scientists" and "according to prevailing quantum theory" are questionable. The many worlds interpretation isn't as mainstream as this implies (and many non-physicists think).
Personally I don't think it makes any sense at all, although I have a mere batchelor's degree in physics so I'm not particularly well qualified to judge. I've never had a satisfactory answer to the simple emperor's new clothes question, which requires no knowledge of QM to ask, "If every outcome happens, in what sense is one outcome more probable than another?"
Because it is (experimentally, based on repeat trials), and QM furnishes us with the probabilities.
This is sometimes stated as "How do you get the Born rule?" but it's a simple and obvious question as soon as any sort of multiverse is proposed. I'm aware of the attempts to answer the question using decision theory but while they produce the right numbers they fail to provide a convincing justification for or interpretation of them (vs the simple, experimentally falsifiable frequentist view "if you repeat the experiment you'll see the frequencies approach these probabilities").