Why I don’t root for the Many Worlds team

Posted by dnetesn 2 days ago

Comments

Comment by Antibabelic 2 days ago

The author treats the Copenhagen interpretation as if it shows that there are no observer-independent things, when in reality it simply states that quantum theory is not about them.

"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?"

Comment by mellosouls 2 days ago

Off-topic: it's been a while since I looked in on Nautil.us, which I used to read articles on quite regularly.

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.

Comment by AndrewDucker 1 day ago

It should be noted that Many Worlds doesn't even make the top two when quantum physicists are asked for their favoured explanation: https://archive.ph/k8BYs

And yet I keep seeing people comparing it with Copenhagen, as if they were the only two explanations.

Comment by unparagoned 12 hours ago

The Copenhagen interpretation isn’t coherent and has untestable postulates around wavefunction collapse.

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.

Comment by lavelganzu 1 day ago

Excellent chart on that page. Hurrah for asking their degree of confidence! The plurality of respondents had low confidence, of course, as scientists should pending some experimental reason to prefer one interpretation over another.

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

Comment by ImHereToVote 2 days ago

This article is secretly about emotivism.

Comment by rapjr9 1 day ago

How does many worlds justify the doubling of energy with each quantum split? Probability can double all the energy in existence for every quantum fluctuation? Is energy conserved between realities? If not, that makes reality a very strange place. We could potentially use that to create infinite energy, infinite people, planets we could grab, if we could move stuff between worlds.

Comment by lavelganzu 1 day ago

They do it by correctly noting that there's no such doubling. Conservation of energy is within-world, not cross-world.

Comment by gus_massa 17 hours ago

Is energy even corserved in each world? I think it's conserved in average in the multiverse.

Comment by IAmBroom 1 day ago

Interesting layperson question, though!

Comment by MarkusQ 2 days ago

This article is almost incoherent. The author (a philosopher turned science journalist, I gather) presents everything from a "which side are you on" perspective, as if physics was a branch of sociology. Little wonder they seem to have trouble with the notion that physics can (and should) be possible without the concept of "an observer".

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."

Comment by rob_c 2 days ago

> a philosopher turned science journalist,

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.

Comment by MarkusQ 1 day ago

>> a philosopher turned science journalist,

> Interesting, I read it as the other way round.

I cheated and looked at the author's bio. :)

Comment by irjustin 2 days ago

> if physics was a branch of sociology

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.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX1EfW3euY4

Comment by rob_c 2 days ago

Outside the realm of the testable isn't worth discussing to experimentalists so might as well be a non quantifiable field.

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.

Comment by layer8 1 day ago

That says more about PBS Space Time than about physics.

Comment by IAmBroom 1 day ago

That's a bit like reading Psychology Today to understand the DSM-VI committee.

Comment by DeathArrow 2 days ago

To me it sounds like someone who doesn't know a lot about physics is trying to mock some theories.

Comment by throwuxiytayq 2 days ago

It’s an embarrassingly confused take. Ughh. Here I was hoping for some good arguments. The non-MWT fans always have this weird religious-ish vibe.