Copenhagen Wins the Latest Quantum Poll

Quantum mechanics textbooks commonly teach the Copenhagen interpretation. A member of the public would get the impression that Copenhagen in inconsistent or nonsensical, and being abandoned by physicists. That is what the leading popularizers, like Sean M. Carroll and Sabine Hossenfelder tell us.

Nope. A new paper explains:

As we approach the centennial anniversary of modern quantum mechanics this paper revisits the foundational debates through a new poll within the research community. ... our results indicate a persistent preference for the Copenhagen interpretation.

It measures support for Everett/many-worlds at a measly 7%. This is even worse than the de Broglie–Bohm interpretation, which is not even a serious one.

Our findings, therefore, do not lend much support to Tegmark’s initial claim from 1997 that “the prevailing view on the interpretation of quantum mechanics appears to be gradually changing,” as the preferences in interpretations have remained rather stable since then.

Tegmark promotes his own strange version of many-worlds.

Nature magazine has a similar story:

Nature asked researchers what they thought was the best interpretation of quantum phenomena and interactions — that is, their favourite of the various attempts scientists have made to relate the mathematics of the theory to the real world. The largest chunk of responses, 36%, favoured the Copenhagen interpretation — a practical and often-taught approach. But the survey also showed that several, more radical, viewpoints have a healthy following. ...

The Copenhagen interpretation’s philosophical underpinnings have become so normalized as to seem like no interpretation at all, adds Robert Spekkens, who studies quantum foundations at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. Many advocates are “just drinking the Kool-Aid of the Copenhagen philosophy without examining it”, he says.

So the physicists actually doing Physics accept the Copenhagen, and barely think of it as an interpretation. The philosophers are unhappy about this.

Also, from PBS Space-time:

Is the multiverse bad science because 15:27 it’s unfalsifiable or an explanatory dead end. ...

So the badness of multiverse science depends very much on your definition of science. If 15:44 you adhere to a strict Popperian view that science is only that which can be falsified—disproved by 15:52 doable experiments—then you could argue that the multiverse is not science. But by the same logic 15:59 you would argue that hypothesizing that galaxies exist beyond the particle horizon is bad science 16:05 because that too can’t be tested.

A more relaxed view would say that science applies logical 16:11 reasoning coupled with a whole suite of tools to collectively find a consistent picture of what 16:16 reality is. If something is potentially a part of reality, then it’s in principle approachable 16:22 by scientific methods. So, if the multiverse might exist then it’s very much in the realm of science.

Nature quotes:

From their vantage point in one world, an observer measuring the particle would see only one outcome, but the wavefunction never really collapses. Instead it branches into many universes, one for each different outcome. “It requires a dramatic readjustment of our intuitions about the world, but to me that’s just what we should expect from a fundamental theory of reality,” says Sean Carroll, a physicist and philosopher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who responded to the survey.

No, it is not what anyone should expect.