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Comment by david_ar | Hacker News Reader

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

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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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