Solution Whitehouse part 4

"No need," said Sam. "I'll do just fine walking myself."
Mark slapped his thighs in frustration. "You can't walk in your condition. Plus, the streets are crazy out there. The whole plaza is full of weirdos and protesters. A cab can take us the long way around and get there faster."
Sam ignored him and hobbled out of the lobby. Mark followed after.
"Ms. Griffen," he begged. "Let's get you a cab."
Sam shook her head. She looked around at the pedestrians on N street. Groups of people were standing in huddles, looking up and pointing at the sky. She followed their gazes and looked up in the sky. Mark looked up, shading his eyes from the sun. There were the usual two moons from the news the day before, but there seemed to be a another bright patch of light just slightly behind the other two. It faded and glowed, pulsating into view every thirty seconds or so.
"What the shit is that?" Mark asked.
"Don't use obscene language," said Samantha. She turned to walk east along N street and Mark turned and followed quickly when he realised her voice was diminishing. "The Copenhagen interpretation expressly forbids the multiple universes theory. That is, every possible outcome of every possible interaction cannot be recorded and stored somewhere in another dimension of time. You can imagine a scenario where ten to the 50 particles in the universe interact in three possible outcomes every Planck time frame, which would be ten to the minus 43 times a second. In other words, there would be more copies of possible universes in just one second than particles exist in our present universe.
"So how do you keep all these copies of all these universes and where do you store them? The NSA tracks and records metadata only only ten to the 15 or so interactions per year. They store far less than one universe worth of information in ten billionths of the lifetime of our present universe. There's no way to record all those data and interactions for just one second, much less 13 billion years."
"I don't follow," said Mark following behind her.
"Basically, I'm saying you don't have multiple copies of the universe laying around. You cannot just have a moon suddenly appear. It takes too much energy. There's no copy of you and I getting into a taxi going west on N street while you and I walk east on N street."
"What if there were? It's possible," said Mark. A taxi passed by slowly. Mark tried to peer in at the passengers. Sam ignored it.
Sam said, "as I just stated, it's not possible. The Copenhagen interpretation shows that the waveforms collapse in one universe. There aren't multiples of everything going on everywhere else. You can't have Schrödinger's cat be alive and dead in the box at the same time. It has to be one or the other."
"Not at the same time. There could be different dimensions travelling out in orthogonal hypercube directions," said Mark.
"Oh please," huffed Sam. She stopped to catch her breath and oriented herself to the Capitol Building. She pointed south along 16th Street. "Down here?" she pointed. Mark nodded. Sam continued, "Do you even hear yourself talking? 'Hypercube directions.' Ha!"
"Don't laugh. You know what I mean," said Mark.
"Sadly, I think I do. It makes no sense. Suppose I have one particle in superposition. It has two states for our example. Up and down, okay?" Mark nodded. "Suppose I observe the particle in the up state. Another Samantha in another universe would observe the particle in a down state." Mark nodded. "Now there are two particles, one in each dimension. Somehow, firstly, there is still the same amount of momentum and thus (we infer) mass." Mark nodded. "First," said Sam holding up one finger on her right hand, "where did the two copies of the particle's mass come from? There was only one unit of mass and now there are two in two dimensions.
"Second," she said holding up two fingers, "it gets even more complicated. Now the particle has moved along a little bit and it needs to split again. But it's in the up (or down) state. Does it flip one more time? Does it go back into superposition somehow magically? Where does the mass come from to make four copies in another two universes?" Sam asked. "This goes on so many times per second that it makes our computers' operations in microseconds look like the eternity of a billion universes. To a computer, human reaction times look like hundreds of years. To quantum processes, humans and computers are like snails sliding on top of glaciers."
"I don't know what you're saying, to be honest," said Mark.
"I'm saying that the moons can't appear in the sky and keep multiplying. It's an optical illusion of some kind. I just can't figure it out."
"Doesn't that freak you out?" asked Mark. "This double-slit experiment stuff is freaky. These moons are freaky. Look at all these people around here," Mark said sweeping his arms at the crowds of people and cars stalled around 16th Street. This is seriously freaked out sh... Stuff."
"Fear doesn't accomplish anything," said Sam stopping to catch her breath again. "I am not afraid of things that I cannot understand. Fear is just something that blinds you from exploring the unknown."
"What about being involved in a airplane crash? That's scary," said Mark. "What about a cruise ship that I might have been on, disappearing into the Bermuda triangle like a ghost ship?"
"Those things are scary because they can hurt us. But once you are alive and you keep going, you don't need to be afraid anymore. You can't be afraid of death. You might as well be afraid of air."
"I'm afraid to check the balance of my trust fund after the stock market that's been sinking," said Mark. "That's a scary thought."
"The threat was always there to your assets," Sam said. "You just blinded yourself to the risk. Every time you pull the slot machine handle, you get a new result. Except that we keep pulling the handle every time without knowing it. We keep risking our net worth on random luck every second of every day. Even if we wanted to stop, we couldn't. The universe will run the game without you. The house always wins, and you always lose, but you have to play. That's just thermodynamics."
"I know about pulling the handle and losing," said Mark rubbing the knot on his head.
"Exactly. Now get me through these throngs of people," said Sam as they approached the North Lawn which was filled with tens of thousands of people.