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quantum immortality?

This is interesting:

In the experiment, a physicist sits in front of a gun which is triggered or not triggered by radioactive decay. With each run of the experiment there is a 50/50 chance that the gun will be triggered and the physicist will die. So according to the Copenhagen Interpretation the physicist is either dead or not dead, but death lies somewhere in the picture.

Via MadGhoul.

But if the many worlds interpretation is correct then at each run of the experiment the physicist will be split into a world in which he lives and one in which he dies. In the worlds where the physicist dies, he will cease to exist. However, from the point of view of the physicist, the experiment will continue running without his ceasing to exist, because at each branch, he will only be able to observe the result in the world in which he survives, and if many worlds is correct, the physicist will notice that he never seems to die.

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What are you doing still here? Read the whole thing!

Comments

I finished up a more complete essay on this subject. You can find it here.