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.<p>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 <i>do</i> 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 <i>this</i>" rather than "we could get in-app purchases and subscriptions like <i>this</i>"<p>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.
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.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety_Is_the_Dizziness_of_Freedom" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety_Is_the_Dizziness_of_Fr...</a>
Also see: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit...</a>
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.<p>(Looks at source code, finds HKCD random function..)
First time I've came across the Universe Splitter was from This American Life with a good layman explanation.<p><a href="https://www.thisamericanlife.org/691/transcript" rel="nofollow">https://www.thisamericanlife.org/691/transcript</a>
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.
It seems like retaining the information about all possible universes is kind of nonsensical; the volume of data is just too large.<p>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.<p>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).<p>Some random ranting ...
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.
Heh, I made something just like it, <a href="https://slitdecision.com/" rel="nofollow">https://slitdecision.com/</a><p>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.
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.<p>Or when a debugger hits a break point reality 2 can proceed with the execution until you are done investigating.<p>It could even act like a RAID backup in case a random bit flip causes one reality to crash.<p>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:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/5hVmeOCJjOU" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/5hVmeOCJjOU</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv5FYrOthvE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv5FYrOthvE</a>
Surely this is what happens to ALL internet packets in room 641A<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A</a><p>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: <a href="https://tobilehman.com/posts/qubits-multiverse/" rel="nofollow">https://tobilehman.com/posts/qubits-multiverse/</a>
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.
This looks like a "quantum" coin-tossing machine.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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?"<p>Because it is (experimentally, based on repeat trials), and QM furnishes us with the probabilities.<p>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").