Sober reflection may be required after my paean of praise for physicists in the post In Our Time, The Photon.
Too many worlds is a thought-provoking Aeon article by Philip Ball.
Nobody knows what happens inside quantum experiments. So why are some so keen to believe in parallel universes?
Apparently there is a strongly held view that simplicity and elegance trump falsifiability, and there are an indefinite number of parallel universes in which everything that can happen does happen. The problem is that we are inhabit just one of these, and can know nothing of any of the others.
Scientific method: Defend the integrity of physics by George Ellis and Joseph Silk (Nature, 16 December 2014) proposes that physics is becoming undermined by untestable theory. Any hypothesis is only as good as the evidence that supports it.
As card-carrying Popperian, I am with Ellis and Silk. However, all seem to agree that the Copenhagen model won’t do. The question is: what can we put in its place?
I have nothing to offer. However, important questions about the nature of reality and of ourselves clearly coincide in deciding how to interpret quantum mechanics.
I still wish I were a physicist. I have consistently sought unifying principles in biology, biochemistry, and evolution, while believing that nothing can advance understanding if it fails to make predictions about observations that could, in principle, demonstrate that it is false. I act on the assumptions that we all inhabit the same single World, and that we can, if we are honest with each other and ourselves, share our experiences of it, thus increasing our understanding; pushing forward the boundaries of knowledge; seeing more deeply into nature. The alternative seems absurd. And, in fact, dangerous.
Nevertheless, both physicists and biologists eventually run up against the insight that there is a problem in understanding how we can know things in the first place. There, I am endorse Philip Ball’s closing comment.
Here, after all, is a theory that seems to allow everything conceivable to happen. To pretend that its only conceptual challenge is that it leads to scenarios like the plot of Sliding Doors (1998) shows a puzzling lacuna in the formidable minds of its advocates. Perhaps they should stop trying to tell us that philosophy is dead.