Litmus test for QM interpretations

Chances are that, if you are interested in the foundations of Quantum Mechanics, you already now about Matt Leifer and his excellent blog, Quantum Quandaries. But just in case, i wanted to point out (and strongly recommend) his latest post about the criteria that any interpretation of QM should meet to be considered as a worthy contender in this crowded arena.

Matt makes his points so well that i won’t belabour further on what he says, but just comment his mentioning one of the issues that have been worrying me as of late, namely, the correct interpretation of probability in QM (or what he calls the great probabilty debate). The issue is also discussed in other recent post by Matt himself, which mentions a recent and interesting paper (also discussed over at Guide to Reality) sort of making the case for Bayesian approaches and debunking frequentist ones. The post goes on to tackle a (to me) intriguing issue: the connection between many-worlds interpretations and probability. For many years i had been reading popular accounts about Everett’s interpretation without realizing that nobody was explaining me a fundamental issue: how does the constant unfolding of new worlds account for Born’s rule of probability distribution? What makes some words more probable than others if all of them exist? When later on i read more technical descriptions i found the, so to speak, interpretations of the interpretation less than compeling. But, again, i don’t need to further comment on them: Matt is already giving a pretty good account, with pointers to further reading.