A Boost For Quantum Reality

Eponymous Hero sends this excerpt from Nature: "The philosophical status of the wavefunction — the entity that determines the probability of different outcomes of measurements on quantum-mechanical particles — would seem to be an unlikely subject for emotional debate. Yet online discussion of a paper claiming to show mathematically that the wavefunction is real has ranged from ardently star-struck to downright vitriolic since the article was first released as a preprint in November 2011. ... [The authors] say that the mathematics leaves no doubt that the wavefunction is not just a statistical tool, but rather, a real, objective state of a quantum system."

Comments

I get it now

[slashmydots]

I can see how people could get so passionate over the topic. I myself passionately don't know what the hell they're talking about.

Re:I get it now

[History's Coming To]

The standard defense for this is that "everything exists" is a simpler solution than "some things, but not all of them, exist". As an analogy, "the set of integers" is much more easy to define than "the set of all prime numbers which end in a 3 and have a prime number of digits". This is one of the strengths of the MWI, it solves the fine tuning problem etc.