Sean Carroll

Now, Niesh is a well-known, respectable working cosmologist at Perimeter Institute, and Phil is a science communicator who makes YouTube videos trying to explain ideas in physics and so forth.

And he's a

And the two of them, the reason we had them on the podcast is because they had a book out, Battle of the Big Bang, which was in part based on surveys they did rather than trying to push their own view of what happened at the Big Bang.

They surveyed all sorts of scientists, all sorts of physicists, and came up with a sort of way of thinking about all the possible methods that people have proposed to understand what happened at the Big Bang.

Now, more recently, in the last few weeks, I guess, Phil and Niesh have come out with another survey result.

They were asked by the American Physical Society, and they teamed up with some other people to survey physicists on a whole bunch of questions that can be considered

not yet settled.

Let's put them that way.

You know, you want to say controversial or whatever, but science always has controversies.

It's not like some flaw in the system.

Everything we understand is put in the bucket of things we understand, and everything we don't, which is what is interesting and we talk about, is somehow controversial.

So they were asking physicists about all these big questions, like what is making the universe accelerate?

What happened at the Big Bang?

Of course, they're going to ask them about interpretations of quantum mechanics, right?

That's one of the

most famous unsolved issues in quantum mechanics.

And if you've hung around these sorts of surveys long enough, this is certainly not the first one of its kind, you'll not be surprised to hear that among physicists, the Copenhagen interpretation gets more votes than any other interpretation.

It doesn't get the most votes.

It's about a third of the people surveyed, but all the others are split.

I think in second place was Many Worlds, but there's a whole bunch of support for other possibilities.