Is quantum suicide allowed?

So here is my dilemma. I'm still reading "The Hollow Man" by Dan Simmons to Clare. The story starts with hero Jeremy losing his beloved wife Gail to the agonies of cancer. The hero and his wife are telepathic. (We are prepared thus far to suspend disbelief).

In one thread of the story, Jeremy falls apart in grief and descends into a hobo-existence (this is set in America) - there is a purposeful analogy to Dante. In the other thread, we get flashbacks to Jeremy's research as a mathematician, full of gobbledegook about personality/consciousness as hologram, the Schrödinger equation and populist quantum theory. It's the data dump from hell, riddled with spurious guff. This I don't read to Clare.

In the end, you sort of know that Jeremy and Gail are going to get reunited, but how can this be? The answer is a variant of quantum suicide. My question: do I dare read this to Clare; does it pass the suspension of disbelief test?

I can get away with the idea of a quantum superposition. Most people know that, for example, a particle's position can't be definitely localised - we say its wave function is spread out. This is equivalent to saying that it's in a superposition of location states. It's basic quantum mechanics, experimentally observed and not the least bit speculative.

We can also have discrete rather than continuous superpositions: the best known is Schrödinger's famous cat. This is also legitimate science though the fine details remain unresolved.

Now to quantum suicide (Wikipedia article). It's like you replace the cat and the radiation-triggered cyanide is replaced by a gun. You decide to shoot yourself. Now, there is some probability that the gun will misfire due to some unlikely outcome of events down at the quantum level. So the time-evolution of you with the gun evolves into a superposition like this:

|You and gun not fired>  =>  a|you-alive and gun-misfired> + b|you-dead and gun-fired>

a and b are coefficients expressing the relative amplitudes of these two states, with |b| expected to be enormously larger than |a| for a reasonably reliable gun.

In the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, this simply means that you'll most likely end up dead: end of story. The superposition quantum state 'collapses' to the

 |you-dead and gun-fired>

state with probability |b|² (or maybe you got lucky with probability |a|²) once somebody notices (these days we invoke decoherence).

But in the many-worlds interpretation there are no collapses. All states of a superposition are realised in separate versions of the universe. Since you have no consciousness when you're dead, your continuing sense of self will continue to exist in the universe with this state:

|you-alive and gun-misfired>

Immortality!

Quite a lot of physicists believe in the many-worlds interpretation: it seems the only way to make objective sense of quantum mechanics and to remove the subjective role of a 'collapse-inducing' observer. But would Clare, my proxy for 'the person in the street', believe it for the purposes of a plot denouement?

I don't think so. And that's why Dan Simmons novel just doesn't work and I continue with the challenging work of real-time editing!

"The Hollow Man" - Dan Simmons (1993)

From the Kirkus Review of "The Hollow Man" by Dan Simmons (1993).

"...  Gail and Jeremy Bremen are telepaths who met and married ten years ago. Together, they find relief from the psychobabble of voices around them, the minds of people they meet and a larger psychobabble grounded in the whole "wave'' of human intelligence.

When Gail dies of an inoperable tumor behind her eye, Jeremy freaks out, burns down their house, abandons his professorship, and goes on the road.

In Florida, he witnesses a mob murder, is kidnapped by the mob, later escapes.

Taken up by Miz Morgan, a rancher, he finds himself facing razorblade dentures over his important parts and escapes from her too.

In Las Vegas, his mind-reading stands him well at the poker table; he's a huge winner, but the mob is back.

After saving his life still again, he winds up in the hospital, enters the closed-off mind of a retarded blind boy, and finds Gail alive in a probable reality that the boy has put together from particles of Jeremy's mind.

Throughout, in flashback, we are treated to far-out wave-particle theory about a unified wave of human consciousness that allows for transfer of mind or being.

From this description, you might expect a lyrical novel featuring great psychic leaps of imagination.

Simmons leaps, but where he lands in a parallel probability is far less vividly experienced than possibilities allow. The nostalgic opening chapter of 'Summer of Night' is better than this whole novel.

Nearly everyone whose mind gets read is sour and mean-spirited. Big brainy equations, small rewards."

---

Simmons wrote "The Hollow Man" after publishing his four "Hyperion" novels. He is still plainly fascinated by such Hyperion themes as whether the universe somehow physically encodes realities such as personality, love and consciousness.

Simmons knows enough physics to appreciate that this would mean a common theory for both quantum-mechanics/relativity and consciousness. Hence the novel is full of references to Schrodinger's equation, holography, standing waves, chaos and fractals.

Sadly, this falls into the well-worn SF trap of trying to weave coherent pseudoscience into the plot (Greg Bear commits similar crimes in "Moving Mars"). 

The "Hyperion Cantos" worked as a beautifully cohesive creation because it merely assumed its universe could be made to work. Like sausage-manufacture, it pays in these circumstances not to look too closely.

Back at "The Hollow Man", if you delete the speculative theorisation there is still an interesting account of the protagonist Jeremy Bremen's descent into American hell.

It's not wholly convincing: Bremen's motivations and actions often don't really make sense and his many escapes from disaster stretch credibility. Still, Simmons is a good-enough writer to keep the pages turning through the bulk of the book.

The final resolution is pretty opaque but makes more sense if you check out 'quantum suicide'.