Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but when I score your many-worlds interpretation it fails your own four-part test.
Anticipation vs curiosity: We already had the equations, so there’s no new anticipation. At first it doesn’t seem like a “curiosity stopper” because it leaves everyone curious about the Born probability thing, but that’s because it doesn’t say anything about that. On the parts where it does say something, it seems like a curiosity stopper.
After your posts on using complex numbers and mirrors, I was wondering, “Why complex numbers? Why do you add them when you add them and multiply them when you multiply them?” That’s the question your interpretation answers, and the answer is, “There’s stuff called amplitude that flows around in exactly that way.”
Blankly solid substance: That sounds like your amplitude. The equations are a specific, complex mechanism, but they’re not part of your explanation. They’re what you want to explain. Your explanation is just that a substance exists that exactly matches the form of the equations.
Cherishing ignorance: (This one is about how supporters behave, and I’ve really only heard from you. My score here might be totally invalid if other supporters of the same thing support it differently.) You definitely don’t do what I would call cherishing ignorance, but I think you do both of the things which you list as examples of it.
This recent series of posts is all about how your interpretation defeats ordinary science.
The “mundane phenomena” one is a little ambiguous. If the point of the rule is whether the theory is claimed as a special exception, then you haven’t made that claim. In other words, you haven’t said, “Things usually happen that way, but in this case they happen this way.” But I think at least part of that rule has to do with pride in how shocking and different the explanation is—a case of, “I’ve had a revolutionary insight that violates everything you think you know.” You’ve certainly shown that attitude.
Still a mystery: Well, there’s the Born probabilities that it doesn’t say anything about. Then there’s the way that the values are assigned and combined to get the final amplitude, in other words the way the amplitude “flows around.” Amplitude has its own peculiar way of flowing that was already in the equations and isn’t explained by calling it amplitude.
So the score is:
Check
Check
Maybe, with a frowny face even if it’s technically OK.
Check
Maybe I missed something in your past posts. (I skimmed over a lot attacks on other interpretations that I don’t know much about.) Or maybe I misunderstood the four tests. Three of them seemed like pretty much the same thing.
I’m not sure I even agree with the test, but it captured part of what I don’t like about your interpretation. It actually kind of reminds me of that “phlogiston” thing you always bring up as a bad example, in the sense that you started with a black box behavioral description and explained it with a substance defined in terms of the known behavior.
Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but when I score your many-worlds interpretation it fails your own four-part test.
Anticipation vs curiosity: We already had the equations, so there’s no new anticipation. At first it doesn’t seem like a “curiosity stopper” because it leaves everyone curious about the Born probability thing, but that’s because it doesn’t say anything about that. On the parts where it does say something, it seems like a curiosity stopper.
After your posts on using complex numbers and mirrors, I was wondering, “Why complex numbers? Why do you add them when you add them and multiply them when you multiply them?” That’s the question your interpretation answers, and the answer is, “There’s stuff called amplitude that flows around in exactly that way.”
Blankly solid substance: That sounds like your amplitude. The equations are a specific, complex mechanism, but they’re not part of your explanation. They’re what you want to explain. Your explanation is just that a substance exists that exactly matches the form of the equations.
Cherishing ignorance: (This one is about how supporters behave, and I’ve really only heard from you. My score here might be totally invalid if other supporters of the same thing support it differently.) You definitely don’t do what I would call cherishing ignorance, but I think you do both of the things which you list as examples of it.
This recent series of posts is all about how your interpretation defeats ordinary science.
The “mundane phenomena” one is a little ambiguous. If the point of the rule is whether the theory is claimed as a special exception, then you haven’t made that claim. In other words, you haven’t said, “Things usually happen that way, but in this case they happen this way.” But I think at least part of that rule has to do with pride in how shocking and different the explanation is—a case of, “I’ve had a revolutionary insight that violates everything you think you know.” You’ve certainly shown that attitude.
Still a mystery: Well, there’s the Born probabilities that it doesn’t say anything about. Then there’s the way that the values are assigned and combined to get the final amplitude, in other words the way the amplitude “flows around.” Amplitude has its own peculiar way of flowing that was already in the equations and isn’t explained by calling it amplitude.
So the score is:
Check
Check
Maybe, with a frowny face even if it’s technically OK.
Check
Maybe I missed something in your past posts. (I skimmed over a lot attacks on other interpretations that I don’t know much about.) Or maybe I misunderstood the four tests. Three of them seemed like pretty much the same thing.
I’m not sure I even agree with the test, but it captured part of what I don’t like about your interpretation. It actually kind of reminds me of that “phlogiston” thing you always bring up as a bad example, in the sense that you started with a black box behavioral description and explained it with a substance defined in terms of the known behavior.