Guth on Observers

Here is a short interview:

Alan Guth - What are Observers?

Why is an observer a critical part of quantum physics? What does it mean to be an observer? Does the act of observation affect what exists and what happens in the external world? Why is observation in the quantum world still a mystery?

He accepts many-worlds theory, and claims most of his colleagues do. He says it is simpler because you just accept the Schroedinger equation, and you eliminate the need for observers or for making predictions.

So a theory is simpler if you do not worry about observations.

They may sound bad, he says, but it ties in nicely with the eternal inflation cosmology theory. That has infinitely many universes being spawned for other reasons, and the infinities make probabilities hard to understand.

Guth is a big-shot MIT Physics professor. It baffles me how smart guys can recite this nonsense.

Sure, you can simplify a theory by removing the part that allows predictions to be compared with observations. But then what good is the theory?

There are no infinities in nature.

You can say that collapse of the wave function is not needed if we just better understood how wave functions can evolve into disparate pieces. Then we could focus on the piece that applies to observations in our world. But that is just another way of saying the function collapsed, with the other pieces being unreachable. Many worlds theory does not explain anything.