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Luke_A_Somers comments on If MWI is correct, should we expect to experience Quantum Torment? - Less Wrong
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Comments (69)
Cite, please.
It's a field. There's no meaningful distinction here.
I'm not sure how I am going to cite that, there has never been conducted a gigantic poll on this matter, but the fact that the leading "experts" in the field who are the only ones doing work on Everett says that it's less than 10% (Deutsch's new book Beginning of infinity) should be revealing enough.
As for branching and divergence, Alastair Wilson and Simon Saunders disagrees: http://alastairwilson.org/
Ah! But here's the rub. Consider a physicist who thinks Everett - or anyone who published after, for that matter - nailed it. Is this person going to publish anything on that subject? No. They're going to go off and work on some other physics topic. The experts are generally those who think there's something wrong with what's out there so far!
In my little corner of condensed matter, it looks a whole lot more popular than that. In two consecutive groups I've had occasion to say something like, "Well, think of what a 'measurement' IS - your detector, and then you, became entangled with what you were measuring" and not generated the slightest controversy. If you're looking at QM that way, then anything beyond Everett is either a substantive physical prediction or making things more complicated than they need to be.
In live conversations on the actual subject, the only objections I've heard from physicists were on theological grounds and general unease (one each). I got a whole lot more objections from philosophers than physicists, and they practically taunted me over it.
As for Alastair Wilson - well, he can go and disagree, but the fact remains, QM is a field theory, so you can flip freely back and forth between branching and divergence views of it.
At APS march meeting I met another CM experimentalist - in quantum computing, no less - who 'had no patience for' (his words) any interpretations of QM; this lumped Bohm and MW in the same boat explicitly, with other unnamed interpretations implied. In response, the senior guy at the table said that he'd 'gained some patience' (his words) with MW once he heard a talk describing what it actually was, and after that it seemed pretty reasonable. This elicited a 'huh' and a facial expression I interpreted as 'queue for reconsideration'. Not sure whether this was just to be polite.