Jacques wrote: > If "various polls of leading physicists have concluded that, when > pressed for an answer, more believe MWI than anything else", I would like > to see the results of those polls myself. Reference, please.
Michael Clive Price refers to such polls in his Many-Worlds FAQ (http://www.hedweb.com/manworld.htm and http://soong.club.cc.cmu.edu/~pooh/lore/manyworlds.html among others). A brief quote follows: >> "Political scientist" L David Raub reports a poll of 72 of the "leading cosmologists and other quantum field theorists" about the "Many-Worlds Interpretation" and gives the following response breakdown [T]. 1) "Yes, I think MWI is true" 58% 2) "No, I don't accept MWI" 18% 3) "Maybe it's true but I'm not yet convinced" 13% 4) "I have no opinion one way or the other" 11% Amongst the "Yes, I think MWI is true" crowd listed are Stephen Hawking and Nobel Laureates Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman. Gell-Mann and Hawking recorded reservations with the name "many-worlds", but not with the theory's content. Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg is also mentioned as a many-worlder, although the suggestion is not when the poll was conducted, presumably before 1988 (when Feynman died). The only "No, I don't accept MWI" named is Penrose. The findings of this poll are in accord with other polls, that many-worlds is most popular amongst scientists who may rather loosely be described as string theorists or quantum gravitists/cosmologists. It is less popular amongst the wider scientific community who mostly remain in ignorance of it. << Anybody know anything about Price's sources for this?