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comment by onehunna
onehunna  ·  4135 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why Does the World Exist?

Holy fricken frick. Okay, so you're saying 'every interaction has a certain probability to do this, or do that instead'. So you're talking about how at like, the sub-atomic level and shit, particles and electrons are buzzing around essentially at random, and that's what creates the forks? Or does it go deeper/smaller than that?





briandmyers  ·  4135 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Again, no expert, but - my understanding is that the quantum world doesn't actually pick an outcome unless it has to - unless there is an observer, to "collapse the wave function". So the universe doesn't split unless it's forced to (so to speak) by someone/something making a quantum observation. An example of such a thing would be the observations made in the famous double-slit experiment - if there's no observer, the universe seems to keep its options open. That's a gross over-simplification, though (and some heavy anthropomorphism, to boot).