From the responses to my comment, it may seem pedantic, but it is the wording that strikes me. "Proof" belongs in a different category than experimental verification [1], as it imply logical consistency, or even an equivalence between the model and the object it attempts to model. So in mathematics, proofs make sense because it is dealing with relationships within a closed axiomatic structure.
We haven't discovered the axioms of Nature, and therefore everything we propose, as a law, of nature rests on the relative foundation of our experiments.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you are a hardcore empiricist (like Bohr, in a sense, were) reasoning beyond the measurable is not physics. That is why the Copenhagen Interpretation doesen't deal with what the probability distribution of a wave-function actually is, simply that it is a useful construct to represent the possible outcomes of a measurement, until an expectation value is calculated. Perhaps that is also why Wheeler's many-world interpretation got off to a bad start, as it didn't provide any new measurable predictions.
From the responses to my comment, it may seem pedantic, but it is the wording that strikes me. "Proof" belongs in a different category than experimental verification [1], as it imply logical consistency, or even an equivalence between the model and the object it attempts to model. So in mathematics, proofs make sense because it is dealing with relationships within a closed axiomatic structure. We haven't discovered the axioms of Nature, and therefore everything we propose, as a law, of nature rests on the relative foundation of our experiments.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you are a hardcore empiricist (like Bohr, in a sense, were) reasoning beyond the measurable is not physics. That is why the Copenhagen Interpretation doesen't deal with what the probability distribution of a wave-function actually is, simply that it is a useful construct to represent the possible outcomes of a measurement, until an expectation value is calculated. Perhaps that is also why Wheeler's many-world interpretation got off to a bad start, as it didn't provide any new measurable predictions.
[1] or rather lack of falsification, to adhere to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability