Actually when Bohr talked about Copenhagen, my impression was that he was a lot cleverer and more subtle about it than most of the people who came after. He certainly didn't have this literalistic picture in which the wavefunction at time t is the only reality and observation makes it collapse through some unspecified physical process-- that was more von Neumann and Wigner-- but it later became thought of as "the Copenhagen interpretation".
Sort of like the way Everett's subtle musings on macroscopic superposition and "relative state" got popularized as the somewhat cruder many-worlds interpretation writings of DeWitt, etc., which tried to do things like count the rate at which worlds were spawning off; and then that was further bastardized by popular accounts that give the impression that it just replaces the mysterious "wavefunction collapse" with an equally mysterious cosmological process that spawns off new space-time continua whenever somebody observes something.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Re: Is the map the terrain?
Date: 2004-03-29 10:08 pm (UTC)Sort of like the way Everett's subtle musings on macroscopic superposition and "relative state" got popularized as the somewhat cruder many-worlds interpretation writings of DeWitt, etc., which tried to do things like count the rate at which worlds were spawning off; and then that was further bastardized by popular accounts that give the impression that it just replaces the mysterious "wavefunction collapse" with an equally mysterious cosmological process that spawns off new space-time continua whenever somebody observes something.