Dreaded_Anomaly comments on How confident is your atheism? - Less Wrong

12 Post author: r_claypool 14 June 2012 08:18PM

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Comment author: Dreaded_Anomaly 15 June 2012 12:38:59PM 2 points [-]

Then it dawned on it me that you were just explicating rather than advocating MWI - that is, explaining a few details of an idea that you know something about because of your profession, but not necessarily an idea that you would champion as The Answer.

Yes, this is what I was doing.

My personal view is that the many worlds interpretation is probably closer to being correct than other popular (e.g. collapse-based) interpretations. What I mean by this is that it wouldn't surprise me if the "correct" interpretation has not been fully realized by anyone yet, but once it is developed, we will be able to look back and say that many worlds was not as far off.

I lean toward the wave function having real physical significance rather than being just a mathematical tool; people said the same thing about quarks, once upon a time. (Many people still think quarks are just a mathematical tool, despite the 17-year-old discovery of the top quark which is too heavy to hadronize before it decays.)

As Rolf mentioned in his thread, high energy experiment doesn't really deal directly with interpreting quantum mechanics and wave functions. While I'm probably better versed in QM than many physicists whose focus is on classical scales, I would not claim to have a conception of many worlds which is as clear as relativity.