Does Quantum Immortality Save Schrödinger's Cat?

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE ↓ More info below ↓ Check out Antarctic Extremes on PBS Terra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvRAuy1ZmTc Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord! https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime Sign up for the mailing list to get episode notifications and hear special announcements! https://tinyurl.com/yx9cusk5 Check out the Space Time Merch Store https://pbsspacetime.com/ To quote eminent scientist Tyler Durden: "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero." Actually… not necessarily true. If the quantum multiverse is real there may be a version of you that lives forever. Hosted by Matt O'Dowd Written by Matt O'Dowd Graphics by Leonardo Scholzer, Yago Ballarini, & Pedro Osinski Directed by: Andrew Kornhaber Executive Producers: Eric Brown & Andrew Kornhaber End Credits Music by J.R.S. Schattenberg: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRl6-nb4iOnsij-vnpAjp0Q If we can’t ever peer into these other realities that are used to explain quantum mechanics, how do we know they exist? In order to understand what happens to those different branches, and to understand why we find ourselves in one of them, we need to embrace one of the interpretations of quantum mechanics. For example the Copenhagen interpretation, which says that the wavefunction branches that we don’t observe somehow vanish at the moment of measurement. Or the Many Worlds interpretation, which states that those other branches are just as valid as ours - implying that reality may split and multiply in all possible ways. In that case we only see one branch because we live in that branch, and the others are rendered inaccessible by decoherence. But today I’m going to offer a test. Admittedly NOT a very useful one - but one that’s fun to think about. We’ll call this test quantum immortality. It’s based on the famous Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment. Special Thanks to Our Patreon Sponsors Big Bang Supporters Alexander Tamas David Barnholdt David Nicklas Fabrice Eap Juan Benet Morgan Hough Quasar Supporters Christina Oegren Mark Heising Vinnie Falco Hypernova Supporter Chuck Zegar Danton Spivey Donal Botkin Douglas Cantrell Edmund Fokschaner Hank S John Hofmann John Pollock John R. Slavik Jordan Young Joseph Salomone Julian Tyacke Justin Ash Mathew Matthew O'Connor Syed Ansar Timothy McCulloch Gamma Ray Burst Supporters A G Adrian Hatch Adrien Molyneux AlecZero Andreas Nautsch Angela Prigge Arefa Ahmad Bradley Jenkins Brandon labonte Brian Blanchard Craig Stonaha Dan Warren Daniel Lyons David Bethala DFaulk Eric Kiebler Frederic Simon Geoffrey Short Graydon Goss Greg Smith John Funai John Robinson Jonathan Nesfeder Josh Thomas Kevin Lee Kevin Warne Kyle Hofer Malte Ubl Michael Conroy Nick Virtue Nick Wright Nickolas Andrew Freeman Patrick Sutton Paul Rose Protius Protius Randall Sylvia Robert Ilardi Scott Gossett Sean Warniaha Shane Calimlim Sipke Schoorstra Steve Bradshaw Tatiana Vorovchenko Tim Stephani Tonyface Tybie Fitzhugh Yurii Konovaliuk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices