Why I don’t root for the Many Worlds team
nautil.us
nautil.us
"Bohr (1937), Heisenberg (1947), Frank (1936) and others explained carefully -- but did not prove -- that the theory makes no assertions concerning autonomous, i.e. observer-independent, things: that all its statements are about experimental situations. (This is why Bohr, and initially also Rosenfeld, stated that no special theory of measurement was necessary: they believed that quantum mechanics was already a theory of measurement.)" From Mario Bunge (1979) "The Einstein-Bohr debate over quantum mechanics: Who was right about what?"
What a decline. Straight in I was hit by article restriction warnings and the whole thing was half adverts.
An interesting publication seems to have turned into yet another tatfest.
Doesn't look good for it's longevity as a source of decent reads, a shame.
Ps. Thanks to the submitter though for taking the time to add an archive link.
And yet I keep seeing people comparing it with Copenhagen, as if they were the only two explanations.
For those who don't click through:
- It's a Nature news feature from July 2025, including responses from 1100 people with papers in quantum physics
- 36% preferred the Copenhagen interpretation, and nearly half of those indicated "not confident"
- 17% epistemic theories, 15% many-worlds, 7% Bohm-de Broglie pilot wave theory
- small percentages for various others including "none"
- additional charts for related questions
Everett’s interpretation has postulates that have been well established and tested and its much more likely to be true.
Plus it’s not like is a popularity test. Some surveys of different populations of physicists do have it taking higher.
I stopped reading at "Let’s put this moon thing to rest. It’s true. We can’t say the moon is there if no one’s observing it."
ehhhhh but this way more apt on how it works (than you'd probably like) once you venture outside the realm of testable.
PBS Space time recently did one on multi-verse[0], watch it and, you'll get the feeling sections of this really do feel like sociology/psychology.
Although sociology is perfectly quantifiable and measurable. Even though arguably the underlying relationships between the measurements are extremely difficult to extract.
A better example is pure philosophy and maths rather than sociology to particle theory. But then again, nobody ever accused QFT of being too simple, so maybe I'm arguing against my own point there.
Interesting, I read it as the other way round.
I wonder which of the many worlds is correct :p
The moon example is painful, but I was assuming to be a "if the tree falls in the forest... yada yada yada..." Example to justify words on a page. Although at the time my brain was screaming about things like tidal forces and gravitational effects, asif I was about to start discussing the retrograde motion of Venus with a flat earther who doesn't actually want to learn anything with rigour...
Personally I'm more worried by the comparison of Planks constant in the small to c in GR. Yes they represent asymptotic limits in many regards but are certainly not equivalent imho.
> Interesting, I read it as the other way round.
I cheated and looked at the author's bio. :)