Quote: Originally posted by KY Floyd on Apr 8, 2010
I'm 100% with Guru on this one. Of course we can never really be positive about the actual difference, because we only see (some of) the one set of occurrences that actually happen, but lets' start by considering what we can be sure of.
In one timeline I go and buy a MM ticket later this afternoon. In another imaginary timeline I don't. Here's a partial list of things that I know will be different in that other timeline. I don't open and close the car door, so I don't create minor disturbances in the air (pretty much the starting point for the butterfly effect theory). I don't use the stored energy from the battery to start the car, so I don't increase the universe's entropy. I don't pull out of the driveway and change the flow of traffic. Down the road at the 4 way stop the order in which every other driver proceeds is changed. They all get where they're going at a slightly different time, and their effect on every other motorist is slightly different. Those motorists affect other people slightly differently, and the ripple spreads. At the store I won't be opening the door. Maybe that affects somebody else going in or out. I won't be standing on line, so somebody else gets waited on sooner. They leave and get somewhere else sooner, affecting traffic as they go. The clerk has an extra minute of time to do something else. The lottery terminal doesn't read my play slip, and it doesn't send a message to the central computer at lottery HQ. Less electricity gets used, again resulting in less increase in entropy. The computer at HQ doesn't create a record of the numbers I would have played. When that database gets backed up it's different, and all entries that are no longer after mine get written to a different location. Again, less electricty is used and I've changed the entropy of the entire universe.
Meanwhile, I'm at home doing something else. Maybe it's posting here, and maybe that changes who reads what. Maybe it means several of you read for an extra minute, and buy your own tickets at a different time. Now I've changed your lives and the lives of everyone you subsequently come into contact with. The ripples continue to spread.
It's easy to say that some things won't change: The Earth will continue to revolve at the same rate, the tides and phases of the moon will be the same, and it will still take 365.242 days to orbit the sun and get back to where we are now. Gravity and the speed of light aren't going to change, because those are things that are fixed by physical laws. In reality, some of them actually are changing, albeit very slowly. Eventually the rotation of the earth will slow to the point that the moon will orbit it in one (much longer) day. The weight of the water impounded by the Three Gorges Dam will affect the rotation of the Earth, slowing it slightly. The effect is extremely small, but driving your car to a different elevation or a different distance from the equator also has a (very small) effect on the Earth's rotation. I can't think of any reason that rates of atomic decay would change even in the least, but I can't easily think of many things where I dont see a valid reason for at least some change.
Again, we're only guessing about some of the possible differences, but let's consider the things that might be the same. Why does anyone expect them to be the same? What's the rational argumentfor that? We're considering hypothetical events, so why would anyone assume they should be the same in some other timeline with so many other differences? In our hypothetical we know with absolute certainty that many things are different, so how is there any logical basis for thinking that so many other things that could be different won't be? You're simply assuming that unless you can exlain why the change comes about that there is no change. Unless you think that lottery results are somehow preordained I don'tsee any reason to think that they are somehow exempt from the extremely long list of things that would, or could, change.