| ▲ | TheOtherHobbes an hour ago | |
CPT symmetry isn't conserved, so that's not necessarily a given. We don't know the mechanism which generates the gauge symmetry that makes charge discrete or generates conservation laws from symmetries, so it's risky to be too prescriptive about what is and isn't possible. In the limit you can imagine a meta-technology which manipulates the mathematical structures that generate reality instead of just assuming the rules are fixed. That might or might not be possible, but the rules have to come from somewhere and there's no absolute guarantee they're hardcoded. | ||
| ▲ | caturopath 17 minutes ago | parent [-] | |
So, what I meant to say was that using the computational gadget from physics, none of the branches will violate conservation of charge. However, my post sucked and I didn't get around to emphasizing that. In quantum mechanics, it's possible for some state to have zero probability, and it's those probabilities that we're talking about everything being possible. There's also the epistemic side where we know that there's a chance our theories are wrong in any given way. Those can't go to zero based on our model since the whole point is we're not restricting to a model. BTW, I really like your example as a good, clean limiting case. ------------- I'm sure people have come up with theories that violate conservation of charge, but they'd have to break U(1). I don't know what conservation CPT would break, if any; Noether's theorem shouldn't apply to it as a discrete symmetry. | ||