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Monday, April 4, 2022

Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics

This new survey is pretty good:
Wallace, David (2022) Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics. [Preprint]

This is a general introduction to and review of the philosophy of quantum mechanics, aimed at readers with a physics background and assuming no prior exposure to philosophy. It is a draft version of an article to appear in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Physics.

It is a little too favorable towards many-worlds:
Among physicists, the (more operationalist versions of the) probability-based approach, and the Everett interpretation, are roughly as popular as one an- other, with different sub-communities having different preferences. (The mod- ificatory strategies are much less popular among physicists, although they are probably the most common choice among philosophers of physics.) But more popular than either is the ‘shut-up-and-calculate’ approach [154]: the view that we should not worry about these issues and should get on with applying quan- tum mechanics to concrete problems.

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