Sean Carroll

Now, if you read in the survey, what do you mean by the Copenhagen interpretation?

They define it as an object's behavior is described by a multi-state wave function which collapses to one state when an object is measured.

I kind of don't agree with that way of stating what Copenhagen says.

I do think, however, it's fine for the survey in the sense that most of the physicists who said yes to that particular option for the interpretations of quantum mechanics probably had something like that in mind.

The problem with that, of course, is that it's hilariously ill-defined.

It's not a good scientific theory.

It's not even a scientific theory.

Not because it's wrong.

There are plenty of scientific theories that are wrong but are still scientific theories.

It's just not defined.

Right there in the definition, in the attempt the definition, you say that the state collapses to one state when an object is measured.

You don't say what it means for an object to be measured, and no one in the Copenhagen world has ever said that.

Some of them have tried to say things like decoherence, etc., etc., but that doesn't tell you when this wave function is supposed to collapse.

Now, the reason I bring this up is because

There are people who are serious about the foundations of quantum mechanics and still lean in the direction of something like the Copenhagen Interpretation.

So it's possible to take it seriously and really think it through.

I just don't think that most physicists have.

If you do, you end up going down the road of people like Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and John Wheeler who deny the reality.

of the wave function and go so far as to say that they deny reality entirely until you have a measurement outcome that is a very very philosophically radical view to take and i suspect that most of the people in the physics survey who said that their copenhagenists don't actually have that view themselves but mostly because they haven't thought about it very carefully

Now all of this is an overly long-winded way of me saying that when we talk about the different approaches to quantum mechanics, there's a lot of pros and cons on all the sides.