You’ve probably been reading a lot of physicists that believe in the Many Worlds view. Nature did a poll of physicists last year[1] and it’s still only the third most popular interpretation, behind the Copenhagen Interpretation and information-based interpretations like QBism.
Yeah, this is also why I said many and not most :)
But I think if you ask experts (philosophers of nature, people into foundational quantum mechanics) most of them would be many worlds proponents.
I finished my masters in a quantum computing lab. The reality is that most physicists just don't care about foundational QM, and stick to the Copenhagen interpretation. To me the Copenhagen Interpretation does not even count as a complete theory. It just stays very fuzzy on when wave function collapse happens, which makes it impossible to falsify.
There are issues with how that question was worded
>Questions: 'Which of the following, in your opinion, provides the best interpretation of quantum phenomena and interactions?'
in what do they mean by 'best'. For calculating and doing practical physics then sure Copenhagen Interpretation. But for what is the underlying reality of the universe you might get a different answer.
Copenhagen has an observer - your particle goes all ways through both slits deterministically following Schrodinger type stuff until 'the observation' when a dice is effectively rolled to choose one. But how do the laws of physics know the bunch of atoms far away is in the form of an observing physicist having a look? It would be cleaner laws of physics wise for them to ignore that, resulting in multiple observers seeing different outcomes. But for calculating, rolling a dice is easier.
That’s a misunderstanding of what an observer is. An observer is better thought of as an interaction which distinguishes between states; there need not be a conscious observer. For example, long wavelength light interacting with the electrons in the double slit experiment does not affect the interference pattern because long wavelength light interacts with both states of the superposition in the same way. Short wavelength light has different physical characteristics than long wavelength light and interacts with one state of the superposition differently than the other, resulting in decoherence and the wave function “collapsing”.
There are other problems with the Copenhagen Interpretation, but this isn’t one of them
Yes! But at some level, doesn’t it kind of get blurred?
That is, we are trying to come up with rules describing the underlying rules, right? The world isn’t made of stuff, it’s made of rules, right? Or math? Just not the same notation, at least.
Help! I feel like I’m falling off a metaphysical cliff!
