The Duality of Time Theory

All interpretations of Quantum Mechanics must normally be able to explain the various observations, including those obtained by empirical research and those obtained informally, such as humans’ experience of an unequivocal world. They also must provide the conceptual principles and mathematical formulation required to generate predictions via input of initial conditions. Additionally, interpretations should explain the ontological nature of the things that exist in the cosmos, and to what extent we can know their realities.

Each of these various interpretations presents a different picture of the nature of the physical world, and each one has its own strengths and weaknesses. Although the Copenhagen interpretation was originally the most popular, quantum decoherence has also gained some popularity, and also the many-worlds interpretation by Everett. At the “Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality” conference in 2011, some researchers collected the opinions of the contributors and combined their data with a similarly previous poll, to find out that 42% of them favored the Copenhagen interpretation, and 18% voted for the Everett’s many-worlds theory Schlosshauer et al. (2013).

However, regardless of the contradicting various interpretations, many famous scientists have simply embraced the already rigorous technical advances of Quantum Mechanics, and devoted little or no attention to philosophical aspects. The interpretations are usually more interesting to philosophers of science than physicists.

It is not possible to review all the details and differences between the various interpretations, so in the following sections we will briefly describe the main popular interpretations in their historical order, and compare them when possible with the Copenhagen interpretation that has been described with more details in section 4.4. We will then end this main section with a table to summarize and compare the main properties of these main interpretations.