A poll of 72 "leading quantum cosmologists and other quantum field theorists" conducted before 1991 by L. David Raub showed 58% agreement with "Yes, I think MWI is true".[85]
Max Tegmark reports the result of a "highly unscientific" poll taken at a 1997 quantum mechanics workshop. According to Tegmark, "The many worlds interpretation (MWI) scored second, comfortably ahead of the consistent histories and Bohm interpretations."[86]
In response to Sean M. Carroll's statement "As crazy as it sounds, most working physicists buy into the many-worlds theory",[87] Michael Nielsen counters: "at a quantum computing conference at Cambridge in 1998, a many-worlder surveyed the audience of approximately 200 people... Many-worlds did just fine, garnering support on a level comparable to, but somewhat below, Copenhagen and decoherence." But Nielsen notes that it seemed most attendees found it to be a waste of time: Peres "got a huge and sustained round of applause…when he got up at the end of the polling and asked 'And who here believes the laws of physics are decided by a democratic vote?'"[88]
A 2005 poll of fewer than 40 students and researchers taken after a course on the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics at the Institute for Quantum Computing University of Waterloo found "Many Worlds (and decoherence)" to be the least favored.[89]
A 2011 poll of 33 participants at an Austrian conference on quantum foundations found 6 endorsed MWI, 8 "Information-based/information-theoretical", and 14 Copenhagen;[90] the authors remark that MWI received a similar percentage of votes as in Tegmark's 1997 poll.[90]
i think if these polls were anonymous, copenhagen would lose share. there's a reason why MWI is disproportionately popular among people who basically have no professional worries because they are already uber-distinguished.
No, but as non-experts in a given field, the best information we have to go on is the consensus among scientists who are experts in the field.
Certainly this isn't a perfect metric, and consensus-smashing evidence sometimes comes to light, but unless and until that happens, we should assume that the people who study this sort of thing as their life's work are probably more correct than we are.
I think the idea here is that the choice on which hypothesis to verify is based on the risk assessment of the scientist whose goal is to optimize successful results and hence better theories are more likely to surface. In this way one does not need to form a consensus around the theory but instead make consensus on what constitutes a successful result.
Ideally this would be true, but funding agencies are already preloaded with implicit asssumptions what constitutes a scientific progress.
I assume this is a rhetorical question, since you are perfectly capable of doing a search for "the scientific method" on your own.
MWI has not led to any verifiably-correct predictions, has it? At least not any that other interpretations can also predict, and have other, better properties.
Okay. I have a hypothesis that the rain is controlled by a god called Ringo. If you pray to Ringo and he listens to your prayer it will rain in next 24 hours. If he doesn't listen it won't rain. You can also test this experimentally by praying and observing the outcomes.
i don’t really view “shut up and calculate” or very restrained copenhagenism as a real view at all.
i think if you were to ask people to make a real metaphysical speculation, majority might be partial to everett - especially if they felt confident the results were anonymous
I believe the vast majority of researchers in quantum computing* spend almost no time on metaphysical speculation,
*Well, those on the "practical side" that thinks about algorithms and engineering quantum systems like the Google Quantum AI team and others. Not the computer science theorists knee-deep in quantum computational complexity proofs nor physics theorists working on foundations of quantum mechanics. But these last two categories are outnumbered by the "practical" side.
not metaphysically equivalent. also, i’m not so certain it will always be untestable. i would have thought the same thing about hidden variables but i underestimated the cleverness of experimentalists
I think "experimentally equivalent" is what GP meant, and as of today, it holds true. Google's results are predicted by other interpretations just as well as by Everett. Maybe someday there will be a clever experiment to distinguish the models but just "we have a good QC" is not that.
