New Quantum Interpretation Poll

1) Does all physics happen inside the observer?
2) Is the observer free to chose angle settings or are his decisions predetermined?

Sounds like a nice gedanken interpretation. Or do you think many people will stick to it in the future? ;-)

Is it formally compatible with all assumptions of Bell's theorem? If yes, how is the experimental violation explained? If no, what assumptions are violated?

Perhaps the fact that quantum theory does its job so well and yet stubbornly refuses to answer our deeper questions contains a lesson in itself,” says Schlosshauer. Possibly the most revealing answer was that 48% believed that there will still be conferences on the foundations of quantum theory in 50 years time.

I’ll go out on a limb to suggest that the results of this poll should be very embarrassing to physicists. Not, I hasten to add, because Copenhagen came in first, although that’s also a perspective I might want to defend (I think Copenhagen is completely ill-defined, and shouldn’t be the favorite anything of any thoughtful person). The embarrassing thing is that we don’t have agreement. Think about it-quantum mechanics has been around since the 1920′s at least, in a fairly settled form. John von Neumann laid out the mathematical structure in 1932. Subsequently, quantum mechanics has become the most important and best-tested part of modern physics. Without it, nothing makes sense. Every student who gets a degree in physics is supposed to learn QM above all else. There are a variety of experimental probes, all of which confirm the theory to spectacular precision. And yet-we don’t understand it. Embarrassing. To all of us, as a field (not excepting myself).

For completion, this poll was also recently discussed by cosmologist Sean Carroll in his blog and the recent video:

The Most Embarrassing Graph in Modern Physics
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/...odern-physics/

QM:An embarassment
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZacggH9wB7Y

I cannot really say I agree with him here. I don't think it's embarrassing at all. In fact the opposite, I think it means it's have a very difficult and interesting question that deserves to be mentioned more often. I also think we should not go around calling it embarrassing because it sends bad signals to the general population. All knowledge starts from being unknown, and contrary to some other interestgroups in our society, we as scientists should freely admitt it whenever we don't know something. It's not something strange it's natural.

This is a somehow surprising result. The elsewise sovereign Copenhagen interpretation loses ground against the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation. This is partly the inflluence of decided minorities in small populations, because the participants of the conference were all but representative of the whole physicists' community. Not surprisingly, the outcome is well different from the observed distribution by Tegmark or Schlosshauer et al.

Another survey came out today with very different results:

Another Survey of Foundational Attitudes Towards Quantum Mechanics
http://lanl.arxiv.org/pdf/1303.2719.pdf

Another Survey of Foundational Attitudes Towards Quantum Mechanics
http://lanl.arxiv.org/pdf/1303.2719.pdf

There is an assumption (as someone has pointed out) made by the bohm interpretation, which is that the initial distribution of particle positions is made to agree with the square of the Schrodinger wave function, but I don't see how in a realistic model, that makes sense. If you only have a single electron, for instance, what sense does it make that it has a "distribution"?

I know it's been a month since this thread was last bumped, but I really can't read this and let it slide.

You don't have to simply assume that the initial distribution goes as |ψ|². Running dynamics simulations with unrelated initial conditions results in the distribution dropping out. Quantum equilibrium isn't a "postulate" in the same way that other interpretations relate |ψ|² to "probabilities" (whatever they do or don't say they're probabilities of...)