Adam Becker

It means that the story is clearly not complete.

It means that shutting up and calculating is good practical advice if you want to, you know, calculate stuff.

But it means it can't be the real story about the world.

Like it is good to ask these questions because there must be something else going on.

So.

The problem then is, okay, what is that story of the world?

And the answer is, we have multiple candidates for a possible story of the world, an interpretation of quantum physics.

There are multiple interpretations running around.

There isn't a consensus about which one is the right one.

Yeah.

That's one of them.

That's probably the most popular one other than, you know, the non-answer of shut up.

That's a stupid question.

So the many worlds interpretation, which was developed by this joker named Hugh Everett III in the mid 1950s while he was a grad student in physics.

He basically got drunk on sherry one night with a couple of other physicists and then basically developed this interpretation in part to stick it to the guy he was drunkenly arguing with, who was an assistant of this guy, Niels Bohr, who's a big, famous physicist.

Everett basically said, look, what if it's just all Schrodinger all the time?

Like, what if that's the only thing that plays on the quantum physics radio station?

It's just 100% Schrodinger.

What if that other thing, the Born rule, never comes in?

Wave functions never collapse.