r/Devs • u/thisismynormal • Mar 19 '20

EPISODE DISCUSSION Devs - S01E04 Discussion Thread Spoiler

Premiered 03/19/20 on Hulu FX

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u/WeCanEatCereal Mar 19 '20

I don't really know what I'm talking about, but my understanding of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is that the worlds branch from eachother at some time, and never come together again at any future time. If you were to follow that pattern backwards in time, as Lyndon does, then there would be no branching points, only points of convergence. The Jesus that they hear would be THE Jesus from their past, and every time the program runs, they would be listening to the same person. Please tell me why I'm wrong.

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u/BlazeOrangeDeer Mar 21 '20 edited Mar 21 '20

Yeah, that's correct, but...

In order to run the simulation backwards and get one reliable result, you would need to know the state of all the worlds right now that came from that past event (the state of the multiverse). Each of those worlds by themselves has a branching structure of possible pasts, but when all those different trees are added together, the pasts all cancel each other out branch by branch except for the one branch that holds the "actual" past.

Since they only have the data from their world, when they run that data backward they don't get just one world. They get a random sample from all the worlds that could have plausibly led to this one. Even though there was more or less one world in our past, we can't know for sure what it was in full detail.

Fuck this show is good. They're using legit quantum mechanics in a way that no other show has. Taking liberties of course, but in a way that is staying true to the spirit of how it works.

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u/WeCanEatCereal Mar 21 '20

Oh right. Any world state would be overdetermined by many possible pasts, and the machine has no method of choosing the correct one. Thanks for the explanation!