THE INTERPRETATION OF QUANTUM-MECHANICS - MANY WORLDS OR MANY WORDS

As cutting-edge experiments display ever more extreme forms of non-cla ssical behavior, the prevailing view on the interpretation of quantum mechanics appears to be gradually changing. A (highly unscientific) po ll taken at the 1997 UMBC quantum mechanics workshop save the once all -dominant Copenhagen interpretation less than half of the votes. The M any Worlds interpretation (MWI) scored second, comfortably a head of t he Consistent Histories and Bohm interpretations. It is argued that si nce all the above-mentioned approaches to nonrelativistic quantum mech anics give identical cookbook prescriptions for how to calculate thing s in practice, practical-minded experimentalists, who have traditional ly adopted the ''shut-up-and-calculate interpretation'', typically sho w little interest in whether cozy classical concepts are in fact real in some untestable metaphysical sense or merely the way we subjectivel y perceive a mathematically simpler world where the Schrodinger equati on describes everything - and that they are therefore becoming less bo thered by a profusion of worlds than by a profusion of words. Common o bjections to the MWI are discussed. It is argued that when environment -induced decoherence is taken into account, the experimental predictio ns of the MWI are identical to those of the Copenhagen interpretation except for an experiment involving a Byzantine form of ''quantum suici de''. This makes the choice between them purely a matter of taste, rou ghly equivalent to whether one believes mathematical language or human language to be more fundamental.