md65536

Off topic: Another topic I was speculating on seems to imply that mass is related to particle size, and that particles that make up mass would have to behave in curved spacetime differently from other particles (including particles that are made up of any such "mass particles"). This might work if all mass could be divided up into particles with some identical properties (mass and size). I suppose my question is, does the Higgs mechanism/boson mean that it makes sense to think of all mass existing in identical "mass particles" that are somehow contained in all other particles that have mass? Relating to this topic, isn't the Higgs boson (division of mass into identical constituent parts) equally simple as OP's suggestion, as far as mass is concerned?

Doesn't the standard model currently predict that all mass is in the form of Higgs bosons? I don't know much about it, but wouldn't the Higgs boson have a particular mass? Then if (say) the proton is 2001 times the mass of an electron, it would need to have 2001 times the constituent Higgs bosons?

Please tell me you have that backwards! If I get this wrong yet again that will make it just about every time that I got it backwards, and I'd have to conclude that I have some kind of neurological disorder. Local time ticks at a "normal" rate for all observers. Time ticks slower in a gravity well according to distant observers. If I got that wrong it wouldn't be the first, hundredth, or last time. I think that's backwards??? Consider geodesics to show this. Light appears to follow a curved path around a strong gravitational mass, because that is the shortest path through curved space. If you moved onto the geodesic, space would flatten, and the geodesic would appear straight. If you imagine straightening a curve, you do it by expanding space on the "inside" of the curve. If you moved from a distant location to a geodesic near a large mass, space would appear to expand more on side of the mass, until the geodesic is straight. It is length-contracted for distant observers... lengths are shorter according to distant observers. -- Suddenly I have this feeling that I've said this before only to find out I was wrong. It is not moving the cylinder that makes it expand; it is moving the observer. I see... so my original example, described from the "inside" perspective, is not right and not very useful. However... with a long enough cylinder and enough curvature, the farther end of the cylinder can't be considered to be in "local spacetime". So the local area of the cylinder can always be the same size, no matter where you go in the cylinder, but the farther parts of it can still be warped. I think you had it right the first time, and only I was backwards! Yes... I'm suggesting that a hypothetical side effect of space warping can completely account for gravitational acceleration (would require math to show this). I want to abandon the "cylinder and gas pressure" example because it is complicated and misleading... or really just wrong. Yes, I agree. And I think that gravity can be completely explained by the differing curvature of geodesics, as a test particle shifts from one geodesic to another as it moves in multiple directions (due to random motion or due to oscillatory motion in 2 or more dimensions). As a demonstration of this, we could draw a bunch of curved geodesics around an imaginary massive object, then repeatedly trace distances of some fixed unit, along the current geodesic, in random directions*, and we would end up moving toward the gravitational mass. Granted I haven't done this... * moving along a curved geodesic would change your direction relative to an external perspective such as that of the person who is tracing these paths. That would have to be accounted for when choosing random directions. The random directions would have to be evenly distributed according to the test particle, not according to the person tracing. This would better be simulated with a computer. Space curvature is very slight, and the distances particles move when oscillating is very small (so the different geodesics they travel on are only VERY slightly different). However, gravity is very weak, and if you oscillate a few billion times in a short period of time, the effect would add up. SO, this is all a way that FOR ME satisfactorily explains gravity from the perspective of a distant observer. I think that the same thing can be explained, from the perspective of a test particle, in terms of the way that space appears to warp as you move in multiple directions onto different geodesics. The idea is a hypothetical explanation of how GR works. I would say that if it predicts a difference from GR then it is wrong. Exactly! Far away parts of the cylinder will appear a different size, but when you move to them, they appear to be the "normal" size. That means that these parts of the cylinder (and the space they occupy) are distorting as you move through it. Local space appears flat; distant space appears distorted; moving into that distant space makes it local which makes it flat which can only be done if it changes from distorted to flat.

I dunno how to get it moved. Either place is good for me. It seems to be half trying to understand GR, and half speculating based on that. I think the cylinder example is bad or misleading for several reasons. I don't think the shape of the volume actually matters, only the relative volumes of specific spaces, and how they change when viewed from different perspectives (most important of which are the changing viewpoints of a gravitationally accelerated test particle). I'll have to check out those links and try to understand them. From an external perspective, my example doesn't show anything, because we don't see space curvature significantly changing as a test particle (with low enough mass) moves through it. From the perspective of the moving particle, space changes a lot as it moves through highly curved space. From an external perspective, geodesics are good for describing what's going on, because they show the differing curvature of space that the test particle moves through. From an internal perspective, geodesics that I'm moving on are not so good for describing anything, because all geodesics that I'm on appear straight. The changing curvature of perpendicular geodesics that I approach and leave behind, might demonstrate it.

I see. I'd misunderstood. But then why don't you record time using the specific observer's clock? It doesn't matter what rate other clocks are ticking at. If the observer has a working clock -- whether or not it is physically quantized -- it should provide a fixed rate at which to record location data for everything else. Why would timing and position data be "according to an arbitrary observer" and yet "position data is being generated" according to another object's modified clock? It seems to me that if you're talking about data that is specific to an observer, the position data of other objects is specific to and valid for that observer, according to the observer's timing.

I suspect that I got it all backwards so I'll try restating it... backwards... - Curvature means that space will be more closed towards a gravitational mass, however it appears flat locally. - Local flatness means that random or oscillatory motion in any direction is equally probable as any other direction. - When moving toward a gravitational mass, the closed space flattens as you move into it (ie. closed space seems to open up as you move into it). Again this means that space warps around you and changes the probability or "ease" of moving back to the location you just came from. -- I can't describe this easily. I might have to draw a diagram. - Continually flattening space in one direction makes random movement in that direction more likely, which continually adds momentum in that direction.

I think you might be caught up in some cyclical reasoning. Yes, if space is quantized, you probably can't divide an arbitrarily small length into an infinite number of parts, which implies that space is quantized. But if space is continuous, you can divide it so, which doesn't imply that space is quantized. I think you're taking aspects of your conclusion, putting it into your assumption. Also... (not sure if I got this right but...) does your Turing machine require that you can record the state of the entire universe at a single time? I don't think this makes sense or is possible, because there is no universal instants of time (due to relativity of simultaneity). If GR says the machine is impossible, then explaining its working function won't disprove GR; proving that the machine is possible would.

Yes, that was a mistake I realized long after posting. The ideas are speculative but all my questions are about GR. Discussing implications of GR is really what I'm interested in. Now we're getting somewhere! On point 1: One of my assumptions is that "curved space" must always appear to be a different shape from some different perspectives, because locally it appears flat (which is the same as saying that all geodesics that pass through a point appear straight when viewed from that point???). If curved space looked the same (ie flat) from everywhere, then it couldn't be called curved. So I tend to talk about curved space looking different from "inside" (flat?) and "outside". HOWEVER, I think that if the space in the cylinder has significant curvature from one end to the other, then a viewpoint that moves around inside the cylinder would see the cylinder change shape as the viewpoint moved. So... would the cylinder always appear uniform, but as you move from one side to the other it appears to change size? (It still seems intuitive that one side would always be bigger than the other.) On point 2: Yes, I think that this is a better way to put it. Okay so if we instead say the cylinder IS uniform, and appears uniform in flat space, then from outside it appears narrower on the side closer to a gravitational mass. From inside, particles look uniformly distributed in a uniform(ish) volume, and from outside they appear slightly more dense in the narrower part. It seems certain that with significant enough curvature, the cylinder would look distorted from any perspective. On point 3: Yes, there's something I'm missing there. I think I'm failing to consider the effect of acceleration. Curvature causes acceleration -- I think I'm showing that in a hand-wavy way -- but the equilibrium state of gas in a volume depends on its acceleration, not just on the shape (as affected by curvature) of the volume. The particles would *accelerate* due to a random drift through changing space, but the momentum they gain would cause a non-random motion. In equilibrium, it is only gas pressure that counteracts gravitational force and allows the particle's motion to appear to be a "random drift". Perhaps using a single particle in an essentially endless tube would be a better example, and then only its inertial motion would be considered, but accelerated relative motion would have to be accounted for. So I'm wrong that the particles would appear uniformly distributed from inside the volume. They would still "feel" that the cylinder is accelerating around them, and would still experience the pressure difference within the cylinder. That all makes sense but I can't figure out how all the details work together. I think I have to simplify my example, and cut out the effects of gas pressure. I think I'm trying to speculate about "why" gravity happens as observed: - Curvature causes space in one direction to appear be more open or "roomy" in one direction vs the opposite direction. - Random motion, or oscillation, would favor the open direction over the more closed direction. - When you move in the open direction, space warps around you, so that it continues to open more in the direction toward the gravitational mass. What this means is that once you move in the direction of open space, that space closes up a bit around you so that it is not as easy to move back as it was to move forward. So I speculate that it is not static spacial curvature that explains gravitational acceleration, but it is that the geometry of curved space appears to CHANGE as you move through it, that explains it. - Random movement or oscillation would continue in all directions, but the slight favoring of one direction would continually add momentum in that direction. Yes... I think that's the way to fix this. It's not the difference between inside and outside the cylinder that is important, but the changing shape of space from one location to the next that's important. The cylinder might only be useful to illustrate the meaning of "open space being more roomy". Note: I don't know if I'm getting "open" and "closed" right here. I'm assuming that space opens toward a gravitational mass, because an object falling into that mass will see space appear to "open up and get roomier". Am I backwards?

Yeah, I don't know what's going on here either. Swansont: Is this an equivalent example? "if you need to count using a subset of rational numbers, you need to list the subset sequentially, but there are an infinite number of rational numbers between any distinct 2, so it is impossible to count using a subset of rational numbers". The fault here is only with the final conclusion. Using rational numbers as an analogy for moving along a line with an infinite number of similarly distributed points, I'd say the following are true: - Any non-zero movement will require moving through an infinite number of points. Therefore, any movement from one point to any other point will require passing through (infinitely many) other points. - The points are well-ordered and will be passed through in-order (ie. you'll never pass 2 points in the wrong order). Obviously then, there is no need to "count" the points you pass through, in order to pass through them. To count "1, 2, 3" or to draw a line with a ruler, I don't need to be aware of all the infinitely many points in-between, to be able to pass over them. It would be impossible to sequentially list all of the rational numbers between any other 2, I think. Thus it would be impossible to sequentially list all the non-discrete points anything moves through. But that doesn't mean that all the infinite points in-between don't exist, or similarly that "physical space must consist of discrete units". I think the main confusion is with the ideas of sequential vs in proper order, which aren't the same.

There's a video that reminds me of this thread: http://www.seventeengallery.com/index.php?p=2&id=80&iid=1 The video is made as a work of art, and it has a moving effect in my opinion (though it's better with a soundtrack... I like playing this song quietly at the same time: )... and yet, it is more rational and more "science" than this thread. Both the video and this thread seem to be about "interpretations." Your work is not valueless. Perhaps it is art. The images are certainly interesting and thought-provoking. Perhaps it can be developed into something involving psychology (interpretation of imagery or maybe even neurotic pattern matching). Perhaps philosophy, and the nature of reality vs the perception of reality. But I repeat: In its current form, I simply see no useful conclusions.

Imagine a volume with flat spacetime, inside of which is several particles whose movement is described as a random walk. We would expect that the particles would approach even distribution, just as gas pressure approaches equilibrium in a container. Now imagine that the same volume consists of highly curved spacetime. For this thought experiment, let us suppose that the volume looks to us, as outside observers, as a long uniform cylinder, but from an inside perspective, the volume looks more like a cone, where one end of the cylinder is wide and the other narrow. From an inside perspective, we would expect that the particles would tend to evenly distribute, so that more would be found in the wider larger side. From an inside perspective, we see nothing weird... no "force"... just particles drifting randomly. From outside, we see more particles migrating toward the side that looks wider from an inside perspective. From here, we see a weird force: Something is drawing the particles to one side of the cylinder, where they remain with greater density than on the other side. Is this exactly what would happen with a cylinder in a gravitational field? Say on earth, with an upright cylinder. The spacetime curvature is very very slight, but then so is the pressure difference between the 2 ends of a small container. The force on these particles would be very slight in slightly curved space. The force on an apple would only be apparent due to the many many particles comprising the apple. With this interpretation, the particles do not see a "gravitational pull" as we see from an external perspective. They "see themselves" drifting forcelessly through a space that happens to open up on one side (with more room to randomly wander into) more than on the other side. One problem with this is that the spacial curvature caused by the Earth, say, is very small, yet the density of matter in the Earth's core vs upper atmosphere is very different. So the gas pressure example would only be an example, and not an analogy for all particles. This part requires some more thought... Basically, it seems intuitive that if space was "completely open" in one direction and "completely closed" in the opposite direction, then particles would move at c in the direction of open space (there would be no room for the matter to move in the opposite direction, even if that movement just involved subatomic mass energy oscillation). So, I would think that there is some relationship between the ratios of our Earthly "fairly flat" spacial curvature vs. a "maximum curvature", and of the "fairly slow" acceleration due to gravity vs. some instantaneous acceleration to a speed of c. Questions: - Is this a fair interpretation of "how gravity works" according to GR? Is there even an accepted answer to "how" according to GR, as it relates to this discussion? - Any problems with the assumptions or inferences herein?

What then is the meaning of the name "So Undo Flight"? undo: 2. To untie, disassemble, or loosen: undo a shoelace. 4. a. To cause the ruin or downfall of; destroy. b. To throw into confusion; unsettle. flight: 8. An exuberant or transcendent effort or display: a flight of the imagination; flights of oratory. Does this mean that your theory is unraveling? Doesn't your theory hold that this interpretation is true due to some "law" or holographic truth of the universe? Just as a duck and an elephant can be found in any muscular arm, your very name spells out your theory's downfall.

I think this post speaks volumes in this thread. You've misinterpreted what Klaynos meant by "causal links". What I think he meant is that you must show how your theory links causes to observable effects in the real world, not how other work is linked to yours. You have misinterpreted the word "link", expanded it to include other meanings, and then associated all possible meanings together. This is what you're doing with your theory. You are misinterpreting connections between things and looking for meaning where there probably is none. The "causal link" that you probably need, would be to show that these connections actually DO have meaning, perhaps with some physical predictions your theory might make, or something like that. I don't know how you could possibly do that, and I agree with Klaynos that what's presented here isn't science. Synecdoche ( /sɪˈnɛkdəkiː/; from Greek synekdoche (συνεκδοχή), meaning "simultaneous understanding") is a figure of speech in which a term is used in one of the following ways: Part of something is used to refer to the whole thing (pars pro toto), or A thing (a "whole") is used to refer to part of it (totum pro parte), or A specific class of thing is used to refer to a larger, more general class, or A general class of thing is used to refer to a smaller, more specific class, or A material is used to refer to an object composed of that material, or A container is used to refer to its contents. Check out this "link": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization Some of the "links" at the bottom of that page may also be applicable to this thread.

I've seen your previous posts about similar things, and I am interested but skeptical, and remain confused about what it is exactly you're describing. Can you provide some more specifics about some aspect of this? For example, falling asleep by will... Do you simply have to decide to fall asleep, and it happens? How long does it take to fall asleep? How do you know that you've fallen asleep (do you retain consciousness, or do you awake after some time has passed)? How long do you sleep for? Is it controllable? Is the sleep, or the process of falling asleep, different from "normal" sleep (by that I guess I would mean intentional but not willfully induced periods of sleep)? What thoughts or senses are noticeably "different" from what you would expect everyone else to experience when falling asleep? etc...

The aspect of causality that I keep referring to is that no information can travel faster than light in a vacuum, which means that nothing can affect anything else over a very long distance and very short time interval (the limit is the distance light can travel in a given time), which implies that if we can observe an effect of something (including gravitation), then that something is (or was) within an observable distance (horizon). A "common sense definition" is not really a good thing, because it is imprecise and can vary. For me common sense is that the horizon is the limit at which any observation is theoretically possible. Your definition seems to exclude things that may be theoretically observable but are not currently practically observable. So I may be wrong and causality is not an issue with your conjecture. The problem with imprecision is that you could be talking about something that disobeys causality, or you could be talking about dark matter, or any number of things that can't be precisely distinguished.

The short answer is causality. Causality is the answer that still remains, as to why there can be no gravitational attraction by matter that is beyond our cosmic horizon. Do you accept that gravitational effects cannot propagate faster than c? If not, then your proposal is in conflict with special relativity, which is a problem because special relativity is consistent with all observed phenomena and is well accepted. Can you explain how causality doesn't apply, or how it can be circumvented? If your proposal conflicts with causality, then I'm afraid you're going to have to provide a lot of pretty convincing evidence before I could consider the possible reality of your idea. If you accept special relativity but don't get how it applies here, I could try to provide a clearer example. If I am misunderstanding what you mean by "cosmic horizon", then some clarification would be helpful to me.

No, magnification is not the same as being closer. The difference is best illustrated with cameras, and the difference between zoom and tracking: It's also easy to experiment by playing around with the "view angle" in a video game. As for "energy"... a telescope's front lens is usually bigger than your eye, and it focuses that larger area into the smaller eyepiece area, which means that it allows more incoming energy to enter your eye than without the telescope.

The short answer is that causality says so. However, your idea of a continuum of gravity does seem intuitively correct to me. I can't think of any intuitive way that stretching space would leave gaps in gravitational effect. (Instant teleportation, or non-uniform stretching should allow it, but I can't imagine how or why that could happen.) BUT, if there is a continuum of gravitational pull from a distant object, there would also be a continuum of light from that object (as Spyman pointed out). In that case the object never goes "beyond our vision". It never leaves our light cone? Please distinguish what you mean by "beyond our vision". Do you mean outside of our light cone, and beyond the influence of causality and gravity? Or do you mean something that is inside our light cone but invisible (too dim perhaps, or obscured by something else). If you mean the former, then causality is a problem for you, and you must then explain how special relativity is wrong or how you get around it in your model before it will be accepted. If you mean the latter, then you are placing size restrictions on the effects of your model, and you should speak only about things that we haven't visually detected (ie. "dark matter") rather than about things that are "too far away to be within the scope of vision."

Yes! Enough of all the textbook science. What this thread needs is more of the "new and exciting" science that is replacing the "old and boring": Blog science! I think congress is close to declaring that science requires popular consensus... and all you book-quoting and reference-citing scientists are soon to lose the popular vote! So the only point of the balloon analogy was that there is expansion both in balloons and in your model (though nothing like the way a balloon expands)? I too didn't get it and still don't, and remain oblivious to what you actually presented. Did you get any of what anyone who has replied to you has said?

Yes, that's interesting and I hadn't thought of it. This is now certainly beyond my knowledge. However I think I'm still technically right... If something was previously inside our light cone but was moved out (or otherwise disappeared), we may still observe that object but only as it was while it was inside our light cone. If we observe another object being affected by it, we observe it being affected by it only as it was while it was still inside our light cone. Once an object is moved outside our light cone, we cannot make any observation of that object in a state after it was moved outside, nor of any effect of that object in a state after it was moved, that was made on our surroundings (whether near or distant). I guess it depends on whether you equate "something" with "the same thing in a past state." It's true that no effect of the past state of something can be observed if its past state is outside our light cone. It's true that no effect of the current state of something can be observed if it is currently outside our light cone. It's NOT true (as you pointed out) that no effect of the past state of something can be observed if it is currently outside our light cone. I think that's still correct because if we see an effect of something, we're talking about that something as it was while it was inside our light cone, not about an effect of that something as it was later (when it may have been moved outside the light cone).

I think that message refers to the filename extension of image. Jpeg and others should still be allowed.

I have my own theories in which the "speed of light" is not constant. You can create your own variation of a definition of time, and use it to create your own variation of velocity. But does it make sense? The problem is, an observer traveling to Mercury is not going to observe any change in the speed of light. You could use an artificially modified variant of time, so that the artificially modified variant of speed shows the speed of light varying, but that's not what the observers are going to see. All observations in recorded history, as well as all observations as predicted by SR and GR, show that all observers measure a constant speed of light. Nobody ever observes a change in the speed of light.

I might be talking about something else, but I think it applies here. The "in between stuff" would be "stuff that is visible to us" that might be pulled by farther away stuff that is beyond our "cosmic event horizon." I explained it poorly, but I'll try to say it again hopefully simpler to see if it adds anything useful: We cannot observe anything within our cosmic event horizon being affected by anything outside of our cosmic event horizon, because the time that it takes for such observations to reach us, would allow the effects of that "outside" thing to reach us. If we have any evidence of its effects, then it is within our cosmic event horizon. If we see something at the edge of the universe being pulled "outward" by a gravitational force, then we should also be affected (to a much smaller degree due to the huge increase in distance) by the same gravitational force. This is where we're clashing. There is no such law, because it contradicts the law of causality. According to causality, if you separate 2 things by some great distance (say by inflation), they cannot begin to gravitationally attract each other sooner than it takes light (in a vacuum) to travel the distance between them. Universal gravitation would be restricted by the theoretical speed of gravity waves, which is c.

Well not really... The stuff that is "farther than we can see" is so not because it's too dim or anything, but because of causality: Light, gravity etc from this potential stuff can't reach us in time for us to know that it's there. No information about this stuff reaches us. If there is stuff "in between" what we can see and what we can't see, AND if that stuff can be affected by things that we can't see, that means that observations that can't reach us in time, can reach the in-between stuff and affect it. BUT, if we can make observations of this in-between stuff, that means that light from it has time to reach us. So if this "in between" stuff is pulled by gravity due to something unknown, and we make an observation of that in-between stuff being pulled by gravity, it is only due to our being able to observe the in-between stuff, which means light has had time to get here from there. But then, light, gravity etc from the unknown stuff would also have the time to make it here (since an observation of it would arrive at the same time as an observation of the "stuff" being affected by it). Stuff that's too far away to affect us causally, is too far away to affect causally anything that we can observe being affected. Or in other words... if we couldn't see the far unknown junk due to causality, but some in-between stuff was being pulled by its gravity, we wouldn't know that it was being pulled until at least the time that the unknown junk became causally observable. We could not see evidence of the unknown stuff, until it is observable.

Then perhaps it is "identity" that I was thinking of as an emergent property. Is it fair to say that identity is a product of consciousness, which is simply a process? For examples I prefer the idea of splitting a consciousness so that there is no distinction between the 2 copies. If you say "one must be the original", that gives you an easy way to associate the identity of the original with only one of the copies, and avoid thinking about the problems. The problem is that there are now 2 copies and 2 separate processes of consciousness, and 2 identities... and while you could clone Bob and say "They're both Bob!", each of the clones would have a feeling of "me" that separates the 2... each knows "The other clone is not me," at least as far as the process that creates identity is concerned. I think that the difference between our points is that I'm trying to say "The clones can be identical and yet each has something that is unique", while you are saying "As soon as there are 2 copies they are different, so there is no problem with them having unique identities." I think both points are correct; I'll have to dig deeper to find a useful distinction. If we make the following assumptions: - Identity is the result of the process of consciousness, which is a result of the physical makeup of a brain (including any applicable aspects of matter, energy, time, etc). - Without the physical processes of the brain, consciousness would cease. - Without consciousness, an identity associated with that consciousness would cease to exist. Perhaps we can simplify everything by saying that the idea that "Identity is an emergent phenomena" is the same sentiment as "Identity is a process and not a physical thing." Perhaps the essence of "emergence" is that it involves characteristics that "come into being" only due to the arrangement and interaction of other physical objects and measurements. There IS no problem with identities being created or destroyed, because they don't exist as things. -- So, okay I think I get your point now. Going back to the idea of being a "god of our own reality", this is true if... - we allow that a god can exist as a consequence of other physical properties, rather than as independent physical properties - we allow that a god can be created by a particular arrangement of reality, and destroyed when that arrangement is dismantled - so despite being a god, we cease to exist if that particular reality ceases to exist. This kind of goes against the connotation of being a god. Instead of saying "My particular reality exists only because I exist", it makes more sense to say "I exist only because my particular reality exists." Reality is the god; I am nothing. Then, going back to my ramblings about a "fundamental universe" vs emergent realities... I would say that the difference between what is fundamental and what is emergent then seems to be an issue of whether a physical aspect "exists" on its own independent of other things, or exists (only?) as a consequence of other physical aspects. One might say that the energy that makes up the mass of our brain is a fundamental part of the universe, and the spatial arrangement of that matter may be fundamental or emergent (I believe the latter), but the consciousness of that brain is emergent, and only exists as consequence of the arrangement of the brain's energy in space and time. If this is acceptable, then I would say No, consciousness is not an extra dimension. The dimension of a space or object is informally defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify each point within it [."]http://en.wikipedia....iki/Dimension]. If consciousness is just a consequence of the spatial and temporal arrangement of mass, energy, etc, then that consciousness can be completely specified by specifying the mass and energy in their spacetime dimensions. Given a particular arrangement of energy, a consciousness can be deduced. I don't see a need for anything extra that can't be specified in the "usual" dimensions (whether or not additional dimensions are included for MWI). I think you're right about what the theory states. Neither "decisions" nor "observations" need to have anything to do with humans. Human decisions seem to have an element of uncertainty to it (though it's not settled for good whether we, or the universe, is deterministic or stochastic -- the latter seems to be the correct one). A particular human decision involves a lot of individual interactions of matter and energy, probably involving a mix of many deterministic and non-deterministic processes. I consider an observation to be any effect that depends on the state of something else. For example, if an atom collides with another atom and is affected by it, that constitutes an observation. An atom can be an observer, if an observation affects it. My understanding of the MWI is that if the event of an atom colliding or not colliding is a probabilistic event that both occurs and doesn't occur (both in superposition), then the event of collision or no collision is a quantum observation (or decision) that differentiates 2 different worlds based on only this event. (With many many other worlds existing, differentiated by each of all the possible different random events that can occur in different ways)