Theories

I've had a lot of vague thoughts lately but neither the time nor focus to develop them well.  Here are some ideas of things I'll have to reconsider later in depth.

These are some theories that I can't prove, but I think may be true due to clues and gut feelings.

Theory: It is impossible to observe alternate universes except in terms of probability wavefunctions.

The idea of an "alternate universe" from our perspective, is that it is part of a superposition of all potential realities.   It exists only as wavefunctions describing the probability of any specific aspect of a potential reality being an actual reality.

However, QM experiments and interpretations suggest that making observations of something "makes it real".  In QM terminology, an observation collapses a probability wavefunction.  To oversimplify and demystify, we might say that "anything that is possible is always possible, but as soon as we know anything about it, only what we know is possible."

However, if we gain any knowledge of alternate reality, that constitutes making an observation.  The more certain we know anything, the more real it is.  But this suggests that it becomes "real" in "our" reality (the reality from which it is observed).  Thus, possibly by definition of reality, the only reality that we can observe is our own.

A rephrasing of the theory is: It is impossible to transfer information between physically separate realities, without physically joining them.

Theory: It is not possible to transfer information faster than the speed of light through the use of quantum entanglement.

This is really just based on gut feelings and evidence from the history of science that basically suggests to us, over and over, that there's no free lunch and you can't cheat the universe.  Conservation laws, causality... these suggest that the universe ultimately runs in a logical manner with a strict set of rules.

I have no proof.

The basic idea for using quantum entanglement for FTL (faster than light) message passing, is that making a measurement of one entangled particle immediately tells you some corresponding information about the other particle, due to conservation laws, regardless of distance.  To break causality laws, this would mean that the observation of one particle somehow changes it (which must also instantly change the other).  So, if FTL information transfer is impossible, which I think it is, this must mean that making an observation of the particle doesn't "change" it in an immediately measurable way.

I believe that the results of any experiments done, will have a caveat that any information that can be obtained from one particle, requires additional context information from the other particle before it can be in any way useful.  In other words, any message passed would effectively be "encrypted" with additional information that is not available at both particles simultaneously.  Experiments may show things like, "When results from both particles were compared, it showed that a message was instantly transferred, however it wasn't until the results from both particles were brought together that the message could be understood."  -- An example of this idea is the "quantum eraser" experiment, which hints that information has traveled faster than the speed of light, however that information is only available retrospectively, meaning that causality is not violated.

In vague terms, this would mean that observing a particle "locks" it to a particular reality, but it doesn't "determine" what that reality is.  You can't control reality through cleverly manipulative observations.

If 2 separate observers are making observations of their realities, they should each see a reality that is independently consistent and isn't affected by anything they can't observe (IE anything outside of the scope of causality).  Then when the 2 observers meet, they should find that their separately observed realities are consistent with each other.  I'm not sure yet exactly how this will be exemplified in the case of entanglement.

Addendum (trying to wrap my head around this):

In my last post, I showed how a misunderstanding of the Quantum Eraser experiment can lead to conclusions like that one can control what is observed in the present by what one does in the future.  But this is not the case.  Both the present and the future each exist consistently, in the Quantum Eraser experiment.  In "the future", the context of the observations may let you observe things from the past differently, but that future context doesn't exist in the present and is not usable as information now.

The same should be seen with entanglement.  Information will seem to be passed instantaneously when observing the results in a context that contains information from both particles, but individually, each particle will allow observations that let it be observed only as if it is an independent particle.

So it's not so much that an observation "makes" a probabilistic event "real".  It is that an event will seem "real" and precise and deterministic when viewed in a context that makes use of deterministic observations, and it will seem only probabilistic when viewed in a context without that information.  The two exist simultaneously, consistently, but can't both be seen simultaneously.  And so making an observation doesn't physically change a system.  You should be able to make precise measurements of a particle's position, and make separate precise measurements of a particle's momentum.  However there should be no possible way to combine these measurements such that the two retain independent meaning or precision.  They should combine with destructive interference, or (as in the case of the quantum eraser) constructive interference that destroys information.

Within the multiverse theory of individual realities for individual observers, it means that there must be some flexibility between separate observers, so that when they come together, there is a certain amount of "blurring" of the combined reality.  It may turn out that this is required for consistency.

I also have a gut feeling that quantum "weirdness", when understood properly, will prove to be not that weird at all.  Perhaps the next generation of high school students will grasp this as intuitively as we grasped the concepts of velocity and acceleration.

Theory: The Uncertainty Principle (or complementarities) applies to a wide range of things either on a variety of size scales, or in a "real world" scale.

Specifically, it seems that the idea of coupled complementary aspects of knowledge apply to elements of thought and consciousness.  This is purely philosophical.  The idea might stem from the acceptance of the uncertainty principle leading me to think about other aspects of life in similar ways.

Some unscientific ideas based on this are things like, the more precisely you focus on one thought or subject or object, the less you are able to focus on a large range of the same.  You can either observe much with little precision, or little with much precision.  Another example is that the more precisely you try to imagine what someone is thinking, the more errors your imagination is likely to produce, and the less you 'get' them.  You can either 'get' someone accurately and not care about the details, or try to get them precisely, and not be accurate.

These could be simply analogies, or perhaps there is some fundamental aspect of the uncertainty principle that applies equally to real-world junk.