1)You either believe in one determined “block universe” where everything is predetermined... 2) or you know that totality must in some way ultimately be describable by all the possible past light cones, i.e. once you are on a truly fundamental level, the you that throws tails is exactly as real as the one that gets heads, and the difference between those two propagates at most with the speed of light through the model that describes spatial relations (the universe). Here's another, IMHO: 3) Branching does not need to occur as there is no necessary preservation of reality in terms of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. You can imagine a scenario wherein the HUP is broken, but what is the nature of that scenario? Consider that it's not that rules cannot be broken, but enforcement of the rules themselves might be observed as a relative property, dependent upon certain conditions. If not, the MWI is describing infinite worlds to describe a real rules set. Can't we slow light?
http://knol.google.com/k/einstein-was-wrong-falsifying-obser... How long will physicists ignore their own scientific history...
> How long will physicists ignore their own scientific history... I think the practical answer is "as long as it is necessary". Even today, we can accomplish quite a great deal armed with plain old Newtonian physics (which is also subject the same sort of empirical broadsides). Einstein's theorems will get patched until the next paradigm shift. Then we'll get to laugh at all the silly ancient ones in 20th century who bought into it. But for now, it is practically sufficient. I am assuming we are in agreement that we are discussing models of reality as expression of a limited form of mind i.e. the Human's and that we will never arrive at the actual full truth of these matters. Einstein's remark on the comprehensibility of the Universe comes to mind here. Perhaps that fact is not a feature of the universe but rather a bug of our (sentient) minds ..