I'm upset they put this in because this is absolutely not the view of most quantum foundations researchers.
A poll of 72 "leading quantum cosmologists and other quantum field theorists" conducted before 1991 by L. David Raub showed 58% agreement with "Yes, I think MWI is true".[85]
Max Tegmark reports the result of a "highly unscientific" poll taken at a 1997 quantum mechanics workshop. According to Tegmark, "The many worlds interpretation (MWI) scored second, comfortably ahead of the consistent histories and Bohm interpretations."[86]
In response to Sean M. Carroll's statement "As crazy as it sounds, most working physicists buy into the many-worlds theory",[87] Michael Nielsen counters: "at a quantum computing conference at Cambridge in 1998, a many-worlder surveyed the audience of approximately 200 people... Many-worlds did just fine, garnering support on a level comparable to, but somewhat below, Copenhagen and decoherence." But Nielsen notes that it seemed most attendees found it to be a waste of time: Peres "got a huge and sustained round of applause…when he got up at the end of the polling and asked 'And who here believes the laws of physics are decided by a democratic vote?'"[88]
A 2005 poll of fewer than 40 students and researchers taken after a course on the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics at the Institute for Quantum Computing University of Waterloo found "Many Worlds (and decoherence)" to be the least favored.[89]
A 2011 poll of 33 participants at an Austrian conference on quantum foundations found 6 endorsed MWI, 8 "Information-based/information-theoretical", and 14 Copenhagen;[90] the authors remark that MWI received a similar percentage of votes as in Tegmark's 1997 poll.[90]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation#Pol...
Reminds me of the Aorist Rods from Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy.
Science is about coming up with the best explanations irrespective of whether or not a large chunk does not believe it.
And best explanations are the ones that is hard to vary. Not the one that is most widely accepted or easy to accept based on the current world view.
Or is this one of those rhetorical questions?
MWI has not led to any verifiably-correct predictions, has it? At least not any that other interpretations can also predict, and have other, better properties.
Ideally this would be true, but funding agencies are already preloaded with implicit asssumptions what constitutes a scientific progress.
No, but as non-experts in a given field, the best information we have to go on is the consensus among scientists who are experts in the field.
Certainly this isn't a perfect metric, and consensus-smashing evidence sometimes comes to light, but unless and until that happens, we should assume that the people who study this sort of thing as their life's work are probably more correct than we are.
It could be that we are borrowing qbit processing power from Russel's quantum teapot.
or you mean specifically the parallel computation view?
Unsure about those working on quantum foundations, but I think the absence of consensus is enough to claim any view as absolutely not the view.
i think if you were to ask people to make a real metaphysical speculation, majority might be partial to everett - especially if they felt confident the results were anonymous
I believe the vast majority of researchers in quantum computing* spend almost no time on metaphysical speculation,
*Well, those on the "practical side" that thinks about algorithms and engineering quantum systems like the Google Quantum AI team and others. Not the computer science theorists knee-deep in quantum computational complexity proofs nor physics theorists working on foundations of quantum mechanics. But these last two categories are outnumbered by the "practical" side.