The Copenhagen Confusion
by Jim Baggott
[Note from Massimo: This article by my friend Jim Baggott is a bit on the technical side. But if you care about our deep understanding of the world, or about the nature of science, or about the relationship between science and philosophy, enjoy.]
I read Massimo’s essay “Physicists don’t know what the world is like, at bottom” (29 May 2020, also here) with considerable interest. And no little frustration. In the epilogue of my new book Quantum Reality (published in the US in September) I close with a brief analysis of a survey of attitudes on the interpretation of quantum mechanics that was conducted among physicists in 2011. Massimo’s essay concerned a more recent (and more extensive) survey published in 2016, which I’d overlooked. Thankfully, in most respects both surveys produced similar results.
Massimo observed that, despite all the popular media attention given to fantastical interpretations which invoke the existence of multiple, parallel universes, the Copenhagen interpretation remains the most favored. (And I heaved a sigh of relief, as this was true also in 2011.)
But what I found even more fascinating is that the 2016 survey, conducted by Sujeevan Sivasundaram and Kristian Hvidtfelt Nielsen at Aarhus University in Denmark, included questions which allowed them to go beyond this simple statement of…
