Responses on Many Worlds and Occam's Razor

Responses on Many Worlds and Occam’s Razor

Friday’s post “Many Worlds and Occam’s Razor” generated a lot of good discussion on Twitter over the weekend, with contributions from Philip Ball, Sabine Hossenfelder, Jim Baggott, and many others.

Much discussion focused on whether or not Occam’s Razor is useful (or is misused):

It's a pattern detection heuristic, not a law. E.g., "Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler." The first clause is the heuristic; the qualifying second clause contains all the content (often requiring an Einstein to provide the content).
— -jm (@jos_b_mahoney) August 9, 2019

Sabine Hossenfelder criticized the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI):

I know I've said this a seemingly endless times before, but here we go again. Postulating the "existence" of the other worlds is unnecessary to explain anything we actually observe and hence such a postulate is in conflict with Occam's razor/good science.
— Sabine Hossenfelder (@skdh) August 10, 2019

Philip Ball and Jim Baggott had this exchange:

You know what they say: "But they're already *in* the formalism! You need to add something to remove them!" To my mind though, |🐱> is not really part of the formalism.
— Philip Ball (@philipcball) August 10, 2019

I think Jim makes an important point, which I emphasized here:

Agree completely that an infinite number of parallel universes is not "nothing extra" to the formalism. And to say the universes are literally in the formalism seems like a mistaken form of thinking.
— Making Up Minds (@minds_making) August 11, 2019

Post author:Gabriel
Post published:August 12, 2019
Post category:physics

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