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Some of the many worlds variants make sense. I prefer bohmian mechanics (I can reason about it better), but I have no objection to MW. Ultimately I don't care one way or the other: the predictions for MY universe are the same, whether or not it is unique or one amoung many.

However, the point I was making is that most physicists believe in wave collapse. The writer of the article was simply providing a reasonably good summary of QM with wave collapse. According to Q1 of your article, this is still a mainstream belief except amoung string theorists, apparently. I agree, it's almost certainly wrong. But that's not yet a mainstream position.

As for other non-ridiculous interpretations, just look at bohmian mechanics or GRW. Bohmian mechanics postulates that particles exist and are guided by the wave function. The testable physical predictions are identical to many worlds. GRW makes different physical predictions (possibly testable in the near future), but the theory makes sense as well.




There are two varieties of bohm interpretation:

one says that there are "hidden variables". what this means is all particles store information, from the start of existence, about all other particles they will ever have anything to do with. how they store this vast amount of information isn't explained. then, they act on the information. then somehow either this information is used by some physical process to follow the SE (Schrodinger Equation), or they don't bother with that and say the SE is sometimes false for some reason or other. notice all the parts where some explanation is left out. that makes it ridiculous to call this a reasonable alternative to MWI. MWI does flesh out details.

the other version -- the pilot wave theory -- says there are special particles that go along one groove of the wave function: our universe. this is a ridiculous attempt to make up some special status for our universe.

GRW is about the wave function randomly collapsing when there's enough information flow we might have to face the prospect of other universe-sized-things. why random? b/c that's better than saying "when we want it to so we can avoid MWI" and better than copenhagen's "when people are watching". how do they try to get away with this? well, mostly universes don't affect each other. so basically any time a universe isn't going to affect ours anymore, a "random" collapse occurs, and it disappears. this doesn't break things too too badly b/c ... it's a bit like saying anything so far away we can't see it, doesn't exist. frustrating to disprove. but still ridiculous.




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