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On Bell’s Everett (?) Theory

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Abstract

Bell’s Everett (?) theory is Bell’s interpretation of Everett’s theory, aiming to remove the picture of many worlds from the theory. In this paper, I argue that Bell’s Everett (?) theory as a one-world theory contradicts quantum mechanics and experiments. Moreover, I argue that a proper understanding of this theory also leads to a picture of many worlds, and this many-worlds theory agrees with experiments.

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Notes

  1. Bell said that “if such a theory were taken seriously it would hardly be possible to take anything else seriously." [5]

  2. In the final analysis, it is the law of motion, namely the Schrödinger equation that leads to the difference between the actual history and the recordable history. If the law of motion permited that the observer can record the whole history of her random jumps such as “up, down”, then there would indeed exist only one observer as BET assumes.

  3. By comparison, the wave function has been widely regarded as a real physical field in a high-dimensional space. It is arguable that Bell also held this view of the wave function in his Everett (?) theory [3, 5].

  4. An initial, mainly critical analysis of this many-worlds theory was given in Gao ([11], Chap. 8).

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jeff Barrett for helpful discussion. This work is supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 16BZX021).

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Correspondence to Shan Gao.

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Gao, S. On Bell’s Everett (?) Theory. Found Phys 52, 89 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-022-00609-2

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