QM interpetations

[Anonymous No.11392746]

Why do physicists take sides when it comes to quantum mechanics interpretations?

If none of them explain the observations well, why not just reject them all and look for a new one, instead of clinging to feeble theories?

Seems very unusual that 90% of physicists are happy promoting theories that don't agree with all the data. Seems counter to the scientific method.

[Anonymous No.11393089]

A relevant question.

[Aeris Turtle No.11393332]

>>11392746
>If none of them explain the observations well

No. Quantum Mechanics' empirical success is unparalleled in history. All experiment results are accurately predicted and explained with the Hilbert space formalism and Born's rule. There's nothing ambiguous and controversial about its experiments/observations aspect. The semiconductor, microelectronic, well pretty much all of modern electronics are built from those successes.

The problem is when people look at the wavefunction or the measurement process (to get the probability of event through Hermitian operator acting on wavefunction) they can't just accept that it's the end of the line, they have to ask "what are the physical things behind all that math", "what are they like?" and that leads to different interpretations. Some of them just add more untestable things to the theory, some of them violate locality etc

The Copenhagen view is we don't care, it is not QM's job to speculate about ontological questions such as 'what are really there?' or 'what are they like', this latter question tries to connect QM to human intuitions, but human intuitions are classical, and will lead you to misunderstanding. QM concepts are not `like` anything, they are their own things, and their only descriptions are the math. That's the end of the line. I believe a physical theory only needs 3 components:
- The physical phenomena: the empirical evidence about physical objects gathered by observation or experimentation
- The formalism: provides the mathematical description of the phenomena and enables the physicist to make precise quantitative predictions. In this case this is provided by the Hilbert space formalism
- The link between the formalism and the phenomena. Born's rule does just that. It states the relationship between eigenvalues of the operator (the formalism), and the probability of events (the phenomena).

So nothing is missing in the physics.

[Anonymous No.11393382]

>>11392746
>Yes, of course I have no preferred interpretation

[Anonymous No.11393545]

>>11392746
>Why do physicists take sides
I don't. Many of us don't. Although some interpretations are just retarded objectively.

[Anonymous No.11393556]

>>11393545
>some interpretations are just retarded objectively
Coincidentally, objective collapse is one of them.

[Anonymous No.11393662]

>>11393332
But why is it that physicist don't adopt the default position? Why are speculations like many worlds taken as scientific theories?

[Anonymous No.11394105]

>>11393382
BASED

[Anonymous No.11394887]

>>11393662
You don't seem to understand many-worlds. At least not in Everett's original sense.

[Aeris Turtle No.11394914]

>>11393662
Same reason the Greeks refused to deal with infinity and irrationals: psychological difficulty. The Greeks thought mathematics must be about constructible magnitudes from compass/straight edge only. Some physicists and philosophers thought physics must be about measuring preexisting property of nature. The new paradigm saying such property is inherently ill defined is too hard to swallow.

[Aeris Turtle No.11395143]

>>11393662
Also please understand that disagreeing about fundamental questions of reality does not necessarily make someone a bad or incompetent physicist. They might be perfectly capable, possibly a Nobel laureate too, there is always a bit of crackpottery in brilliant physicists.

We can produce functional airplanes that can be put into service without building and testing prototypes using the continuum model of matter in Aerodynamics while the same people could believe matter is made of small atoms. Rather than worrying whether it is true that matter is continuous, science focuses on whether the model provides verifiable results. If it works, the model will be used, if not, the model is refined or discarded. This leads to interesting work in all areas of science where sometimes people employ mixture of models (e.g in nanophysics matter can behave like individual particles in some places and like a continuum in other places).

Maybe it's not a bug, but a feature of modern physics that people can have different philosophical views about the same fundamental topic.