Inspired by this post, I was reading some of the history today, and I learned something that surprised me: in all of his writings, Bohr apparently never once talked about the “collapse of the wavefunction,” or the disappearance of all but one measurement outcome, or any similar formulation. Indeed, Huve Erett’s theory would have struck the historical Bohr as complete nonsense, since Bohr didn’t believe that wavefunctions were real in the first place—there was nothing to collapse!
So it might be that MWI proponents (and Bohmians, for that matter) underestimate just how non-realist Bohr really was. They ask themselves: “what would the world have to be like if Copenhagenism were true?”—and the answer they come up with involves wavefunction collapse, which strikes them as absurd, so then that’s what they criticize. But the whole point of Bohr’s philosophy was that you don’t even ask such questions. (Needless to say, this is not a ringing endorsement of his philosophy.)
Incidentally, I’m skeptical of the idea that MWI never even occurred to Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, or von Neumann. I conjecture that something like it must have occurred to them, as an obvious reductio ad absurdum—further underscoring (in their minds) why one shouldn’t regard the wavefunction as “real”. Does anyone have any historical evidence either way?
Yes, the real CI is rather minimal and non-commital. That, not idiocy, explains its widespread adoption. Objective Reduction is a different and alter theory.
Inspired by this post, I was reading some of the history today, and I learned something that surprised me: in all of his writings, Bohr apparently never once talked about the “collapse of the wavefunction,” or the disappearance of all but one measurement outcome, or any similar formulation. Indeed, Huve Erett’s theory would have struck the historical Bohr as complete nonsense, since Bohr didn’t believe that wavefunctions were real in the first place—there was nothing to collapse!
So it might be that MWI proponents (and Bohmians, for that matter) underestimate just how non-realist Bohr really was. They ask themselves: “what would the world have to be like if Copenhagenism were true?”—and the answer they come up with involves wavefunction collapse, which strikes them as absurd, so then that’s what they criticize. But the whole point of Bohr’s philosophy was that you don’t even ask such questions. (Needless to say, this is not a ringing endorsement of his philosophy.)
Incidentally, I’m skeptical of the idea that MWI never even occurred to Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, or von Neumann. I conjecture that something like it must have occurred to them, as an obvious reductio ad absurdum—further underscoring (in their minds) why one shouldn’t regard the wavefunction as “real”. Does anyone have any historical evidence either way?
Yes, the real CI is rather minimal and non-commital. That, not idiocy, explains its widespread adoption. Objective Reduction is a different and alter theory.