Sean Carroll

There's a lot of reasons, or even better than pros and cons, let's say there are good reasons why people might prefer one approach over another.

And there are also good reasons why people might reject any single approach.

I'm very much on the record as saying that there is a feature of all formulations of quantum mechanics that they ask you to believe something that you really kind of don't want to believe.

They push you into a place where you didn't want to be if you want to accept what nature is trying to tell you.

So that's also true for my favorite theory, the Everettian version of quantum mechanics or the many worlds theory.

And I've often said that one of the frustrating things about being someone who talks about many worlds in the popular landscape is that there are so many bad objections to the many worlds interpretation.

There are philosophically bad objections like, oh, that's just too many worlds and you can't observe them.

There are also physically bad objections, like where does the energy come from to make all these different worlds?

So I don't take any of those very seriously because they are very easily answered.

But there are things that are less easily answered about many worlds.

It is not, I would say, a completely 100% understood formulation of quantum mechanics.

What the theory itself says, I think is more or less completely understood, but how to apply it to the world becomes a little trickier.

So today I'm going to fulfill a promise I made during an AMA not too long ago and do a solo podcast where I talk about my ideas, my favorite ways of taking the bare bones postulate of many worlds, aka Everettian quantum mechanics, and connecting it to the real world.

Not because I think it's really an objection to Everett in any way, but it's an open question.

And these open questions are important.

Open questions are, you know, opportunities to learn new things, to go beyond what you already understand.

You shouldn't avoid them.

I'm on the side of saying that if you have a new theory or even an old theory like this one,

In physics, if you think the theory is promising, you should be the person who is most upfront about the open questions, the things we don't know in this theory, because it's not a problem to have open questions.

You always have open questions.