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If decoherence is "untestable" relative to collapse, then so too, collapse is "untestable" relative to decoherence.

Of course! Nobody questions that. The two are equivalent. That means, neither is more true than the other. You just happen to be in the minority which feels that thinking about multiple worlds makes their head ache less than thinking about the state vector reduction.

What if the history of physics had transpired differently—what if Hugh Everett and John Wheeler had stood in the place of Bohr and Heisenberg, and vice versa?

My guess is, we wouldn't have had to wait until 1957 for someone to say: "Fuck that noise, let's just forget about the multiple worlds and pretend the wave function collapses when I make a measurement." They would be like, "All right buddy, I'm sure you're totally right that there are really multiple worlds and all that, I'll just act like it's merely a wave function collapse for a moment, just to get on with my work of actually doing something as a physicist." My guess is that would happen within the year.




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