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Comment by kurthr | Hacker News Reader

Weird, it seems like that's one of the most popular discussions in pop-sci. The real question is more philosophical... does Many Worlds even mean anything scientific (eg is it testable or a usefully simple model). Certainly, it's entertaining.

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He published a paper with some colleagues on a way to disprove Everettian Mechanics. It falls into the difficult but not impossible category. It involves looking for minuscule energy spikes that would be evidence of some kind of "collapse of the wave function" that would rule out Many Worlds.

The Copenhagen Interpretation isn't a theory, it it is an attitude.

Shouldn't that be "does the Copenhagen intepretation even mean anything scientific"?

The answer to both is "no." It is really obvious that the answer is no, because they lead to the same predictions. There is real work being done in quantum foundations (which is not the same thing as fundamental physics), but it doesn't involve arguing about MWI and Copenhagen. :-)

Why isn’t debating of the significance of quantum mechanics “real work”?

Because some debates are like, "Given the proposition 'x or not x', is x true?"

I’m not sure about what precisely you’re referring to. There is an entire school of mathematics that dismisses the law of excluded of middle and I’m not sure why that would not be “real work”.

There's no system of logic where 'x or not x is true' implies x.

The example you gave is not specific enough to guess what you are referring to.

I am referring to the fact that it is possible for indeterminacy to be an absolute fact and not a temporary artifact of incomplete development.

I can make that an axiom of my system. It'll cause explosion and is a next to useless system but it's still a system.

Why though? MWI works just fine.

So does Copenhagen. That's why you can't choose between them.

Didn't you say you can't tell whether randomness is true or due to incomplete interpretation? If Copenhagen is incomplete, then it doesn't work, only its one part works - the Schrodinger equation.

MWI doesn't allow you to predict what you will end up observing, so it is just as incomplete.

It doesn't predict collapse if that's what you mean, because collapse doesn't happen, but it predicts that the result of observation is eigenvalue, and the prediction is consistent and matches observation.

MWI is confirmed in a sense that it exactly matches the Schrodinger equation and doesn't add anything contradictory or ad hoc hypotheses, and is compatible with the rest of science. And the Schrodinger equation is verified quantitatively. This is as far as verification goes.

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