I was once very interested in the question of what “time” is and what “entropy” is. The thing is, I watched popular science videos on YouTube, and nowhere was there a normal answer, at best it was some kind of circular argumentation. Also, nowhere was there a normal explanation of what entropy was, only vaguely stating that it was a “measure of disorder in the system”.
In my head, however, the idea swirled around that it had something to do with the fact that there are more directions outward than inward in space. And I also twirled that it must be connected with the law of least action, for which I also did not meet such an explanation, that is, that the reason is that the straight path is one path, and there are at least 4 detours, and this is only the closest, with each step there will be 2 times less, respectively, if we imagine that there is no “law” of least action, we will still see it, because for a particle the probability to be in each next step from the central path will be 2 times less, because there are twice as many paths, and for a wave it will not even be probability, but purely its distribution.
All these thoughts were inspired to me by a video of balls falling down a pyramid of pegs, and they end up having paths on both sides inward at each step, and only one side path outward, and they form a normal distribution. That is, to put it another way, the point is that although the number of points is the same, the paths in the center converge to each other and the paths on the edges do not, the two paths in the center form a single cluster of central paths and the two paths on the edges do not.
And from this we can assume that the average expected space will have a shape close to a square, a cube, a tesseract, or another figure with equal sides, because although there is only one such figure, and many other variants, these variants do not fit together, but variants close to a cube fit into a cube.
This also explains for me why Everett’s chaotic branches do not create a chaotic world. There are more chaotic branches, but they form a circle around the edge rather than a circle in the center, the least chaotic branches are fewer, but they converge to a world close to order, but the most chaotic branches differ from each other even more than they differ from order.
Somewhere here on lasswrong I saw a question about why, if we live in a Tegmark universe, we don’t see constant violations of the laws of physics, like “clothes turn into crocodiles.” However… We do observe. But only “clothes” and “crocodile” are too meaningfully human variants, in fact there are much more, one mole of matter contains ~10^23 particles, and even if we only assume different variants of their presence/absence, it is 2(1023), our system is too big to notice these artifacts, however if we go to individual particles...
That’s exactly what we’ll see, constant random fluctuations. Quantum. This can be considered a successful prediction of Tegmark, although in fact only retrospective.
I was once very interested in the question of what “time” is and what “entropy” is. The thing is, I watched popular science videos on YouTube, and nowhere was there a normal answer, at best it was some kind of circular argumentation. Also, nowhere was there a normal explanation of what entropy was, only vaguely stating that it was a “measure of disorder in the system”.
In my head, however, the idea swirled around that it had something to do with the fact that there are more directions outward than inward in space. And I also twirled that it must be connected with the law of least action, for which I also did not meet such an explanation, that is, that the reason is that the straight path is one path, and there are at least 4 detours, and this is only the closest, with each step there will be 2 times less, respectively, if we imagine that there is no “law” of least action, we will still see it, because for a particle the probability to be in each next step from the central path will be 2 times less, because there are twice as many paths, and for a wave it will not even be probability, but purely its distribution.
All these thoughts were inspired to me by a video of balls falling down a pyramid of pegs, and they end up having paths on both sides inward at each step, and only one side path outward, and they form a normal distribution. That is, to put it another way, the point is that although the number of points is the same, the paths in the center converge to each other and the paths on the edges do not, the two paths in the center form a single cluster of central paths and the two paths on the edges do not.
And from this we can assume that the average expected space will have a shape close to a square, a cube, a tesseract, or another figure with equal sides, because although there is only one such figure, and many other variants, these variants do not fit together, but variants close to a cube fit into a cube.
This also explains for me why Everett’s chaotic branches do not create a chaotic world. There are more chaotic branches, but they form a circle around the edge rather than a circle in the center, the least chaotic branches are fewer, but they converge to a world close to order, but the most chaotic branches differ from each other even more than they differ from order.
Somewhere here on lasswrong I saw a question about why, if we live in a Tegmark universe, we don’t see constant violations of the laws of physics, like “clothes turn into crocodiles.” However… We do observe. But only “clothes” and “crocodile” are too meaningfully human variants, in fact there are much more, one mole of matter contains ~10^23 particles, and even if we only assume different variants of their presence/absence, it is 2(1023), our system is too big to notice these artifacts, however if we go to individual particles...
That’s exactly what we’ll see, constant random fluctuations. Quantum. This can be considered a successful prediction of Tegmark, although in fact only retrospective.