Indeed, Bayes is great for suggesting a promising model. But no matter how promising, if the model ends up not offering any new predictions, it is not better than any other one with the same predictive power, except maybe for didactic purposes. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what MWI is.
Would you recommend MWI for didactic purposes?
Alternatively, would you recommend it in the counterfactual where it had well-written (perhaps over-written) textbooks, like the statistical interpretation and/or (non-straw-)Copenhagen have?
Probably not. Collapse, as is currently taught, makes the miracle step clear and leaves one wanting to know more. MWI is a mysterious answer that gives a false feeling of a dissolved question.
The problem with wanting to know more in this case is that it wastes everyone’s time trying to fill a gap that doesn’t exist.
You get very serious articles—in the popular press at SciAm’s level, at least—talking about how Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity are totally incompatible, which is farcical. You get serious physicists devising new and ever stupider interpretations of quantum mechanics because the orthodoxy is so obviously wrong.
This search is one we could do without.
And if it doesn’t dissolve all questions, it certainly does dissolve some. If all the components continue to exist, then we’ve got the dynamics nailed down. We’re not losing any interesting questions - QM is certainly worth continuing to validate every which way, just like all the other well-accepted theories we keep obsessively checking. We don’t need to intentionally confuse ourselves as to what it means to keep doing that.
The projection step is still a mystery. Even if we can trace the density matrix down to the diagonal state (not sure if it has been done experimentally or numerically), it’s not clear when the real or perceived eigenstate selection/world splitting happens. Seems like an “interesting question” to me.
Umm, in what sense does the theory decoherence not address this, aside from the issue of subjective experience? There’s a gradual decoupling of the components as they lose mutual information.
Would you recommend MWI for didactic purposes?
Alternatively, would you recommend it in the counterfactual where it had well-written (perhaps over-written) textbooks, like the statistical interpretation and/or (non-straw-)Copenhagen have?
Probably not. Collapse, as is currently taught, makes the miracle step clear and leaves one wanting to know more. MWI is a mysterious answer that gives a false feeling of a dissolved question.
The problem with wanting to know more in this case is that it wastes everyone’s time trying to fill a gap that doesn’t exist.
You get very serious articles—in the popular press at SciAm’s level, at least—talking about how Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity are totally incompatible, which is farcical. You get serious physicists devising new and ever stupider interpretations of quantum mechanics because the orthodoxy is so obviously wrong.
This search is one we could do without.
And if it doesn’t dissolve all questions, it certainly does dissolve some. If all the components continue to exist, then we’ve got the dynamics nailed down. We’re not losing any interesting questions - QM is certainly worth continuing to validate every which way, just like all the other well-accepted theories we keep obsessively checking. We don’t need to intentionally confuse ourselves as to what it means to keep doing that.
The projection step is still a mystery. Even if we can trace the density matrix down to the diagonal state (not sure if it has been done experimentally or numerically), it’s not clear when the real or perceived eigenstate selection/world splitting happens. Seems like an “interesting question” to me.
Umm, in what sense does the theory decoherence not address this, aside from the issue of subjective experience? There’s a gradual decoupling of the components as they lose mutual information.
Why do you call experimental testing “subjective experience” instead of “the ultimate way to tell if a model is worth anything”?