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Physicists disagree wildly on what quantum mechanics says about reality, Nature survey shows

Conceptual illustration of a person lifting up a wavefunction to reveal a glowing light to a cat. Other people gather round in discussion. There is a glowing blurred sphere above the wavefunction.

Illustration: Olena Shmahalo/Nature

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Nature 643, 1175-1179 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-02342-y

Additional survey analysis by Richard Van Noorden and Jeffrey M. Perkel.

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 12 August 2025: This News feature gave the wrong nationality for Erwin Schrödinger. Furthermore, the survey it was based on grouped the ‘many worlds’ (MW) and ‘consistent histories’ (CH) interpretations together, with the rationale that both involve the quantum state evolving smoothly and both involve branching into different worlds. In fact, CH does not involve branching into different worlds, so should not have been grouped with MW. Three respondents wrote in free-text boxes that they preferred CH; of these, two had selected ‘other’ in their answer to the quantum interpretation they preferred, and one had selected the Copenhagen interpretation.

References

  1. Sivasundaram, S. & Nielsen, K. H. Preprint at arXiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1612.00676 (2016).

  2. Hallas, A. M. Nature Phys. 21, 491–493 (2025).

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  3. Sharoglazova, V., Puplauskis, M., Mattschas, C., Toebes, C. & Klaers, J. Nature 643, 67–72 (2025).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

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Supplementary Information

  1. Survey methodology
  2. Survey questions
  3. Full survey results data

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