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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Because it doesn’t add anything into the discussion.

If the test can't differentiate between QM interpretations, assuming some specific hypothetical interpretation is useless.

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Right, exactly. I experience great ennui when people discuss this stuff via popularizations.

Let's start a thread where we talk about how tcp/ip works ... but with a twist. The only admissible references in the discussion are color pictures aimed at non-programmers. Anybody tries to talk about what actually works, we label them the "shut up and program" crowd and decry their lack of imagination.

But it does subtract something from the discussion. It subtracts spookiness, it subtracts action at a distance, and it subtracts anything going faster than light.

And it adds this whole world-collapsing unnecessary machinery that has no practical applications or physical evidence. I myself would prefer Bohmian mechanics if we had to choose a single interpretation. Moreover, it's possible to define a non-stochastic version of the theory (no gods playing dice), which would explain QM somewhat like Classical Mechanics explains Thermodynamics; and it's falsifiable by looking for non-equilibrium conditions (admittedly those conditions will be very hard to achieve).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie%E2%80%93Bohm_theory...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_non-equilibrium

My understanding was that MWI allows superpositions of macroscopic objects (the universal wavefunction), whereas the Copenhagen interpretation doesn't (macroscopic objects cause wavefunction collapse), which is in principle testable [1] (although not with current technology).

[1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/#5

One surely has to question any claim that is

a) only testable with "unforeseeable future technology" and

b) whose "burden of an experimental proof lies with the opponents".

Win-Win there I think.

a) Nobody said "unforeseeable". Macroscopic superpositions are entirely foreseeable, we just don't have the technology to keep them in a coherent state.

b) The link only says that some people have argued that position. I think all they're saying is that "wavefunction collapse caused by some arbitrary division between microscopic and macroscopic objects" is a stronger claim than MWI

> Nobody said "unforeseeable"

OK. The actual quote from the linked reference was

"These proposals are all for gedanken experiments that cannot be performed with current or any foreseeable future technology".

So I took a little license in quoting. I should ha quoted it more correctly, you're quite right.

That sentence is not talking about MWI, it's talking about wavefunction collapse interpretations.

This experiment[1] seems to rule out "macrorealism" (the principle that objects bigger than a certain size are immune to superposition).

[1] https://physics.aps.org/articles/v8/6

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