Born to do Math 62 – Feynman, Sum Above All
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/05/22
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Rick Rosner: But that doesn’t mean that you have to see everything through the lens of multi-worlds theory. There are probably other theories that have a similar deal. String Theory may become a more powerful tool for describing the world, but, right now, it hasn’t delivered enough specific predictions to be very useful.
But at some point in the future, String Theory could be worked out so that it might be a framework that is helpful in certain instances. Feynman, there’s a Sum Over Histories principle that says particles take very possible path between point A and point B.
That is a helpful framework for doing certain quantum tasks. But it is not something—if you’re sufficiently trained in quantum mechanics, you may have this in the back of your mind, but you don’t need the Sum Over Histories principle to do quantum mechanics.
None of which gets to the question of why we exist rather than not, and the reason for the ways we exist. That is, 3 spatial dimensions, roughly with an asterisk and that asterisk being quantum effects at small scales, and the curvature of space at huge scales.
One temporal dimension too.
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