Chris5 comments on Where Philosophy Meets Science - Less Wrong

24 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 April 2008 09:21PM

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Comment author: Chris5 12 April 2008 11:19:50PM 2 points [-]

Sometime last year, I got involved in studying foundations of quantum mechanics. Like many people before me, I rediscovered decoherence. (In my case, the context was a heavy atom interacting with Bose-Einstein Condensate.)

After I discussed my work with one of our resident experts in the topic, he pointed out to me that David Bohm had made the same argument (in words, not mathematically) in the early 1950's. In fact, the idea had even been present before that, though Bohm's explanation is the best of the early ones. He postulated the following explanation why the Copenhagen interpretation became the dominant one: the Copenhagen crowd had more Ph.D. students, and network effects (Copenhagen people becoming editors at PRL, for instance) pushed a nonsensical theory into the mainstream.