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REVIEW 3 major objections 6 minor 3 references

Has Anything Changed? Tracking Long-Term Interpretational Preferences in Quantum Mechanics

T0 review · 3 major / 6 minor · reviewed 2026-08-06 · deepseek-v4-flash

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Pith's one-line read New poll: physicists still favor Copenhagen after 25 years.

desk verdict Useful new 2025 poll data, but the cross-decade stability claim rests on a comparability assumption the paper's own no-preference numbers undermine. read the letter →

arxiv 2507.09988 v1 pith:2XRNVYBC submitted 2025-07-14 quant-ph physics.hist-ph

Petr O. Jedlička , Šimon Kos , Martin Šmíd , Jiří Vomlel , Jan Slavík This is my paper · ORCID
classification quant-phphysics.hist-ph PACS 03.65.Ta
keywords quantumfoundationsCopenhageninterpretationmany-worldsdeBroglie-BohmtheoryinterpretationalpreferencesscientificpollingBayesiannetworkanalysisreplicationstudy
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

The pith

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The reading

The paper reports a new, small poll of physicists at four Czech research institutions, run with questions adapted from the 2011 conference survey, and compares answers to four earlier polls spanning 1997–2016. Its central claim is that the Copenhagen interpretation has remained the most preferred interpretation among physicists who state a preference, and that the large swings seen in past polls come mostly from the self-selected audiences at specialist conferences rather than from a genuine change in community attitudes over time. The authors therefore read their results as evidence against an often-quoted claim from the 1997 workshop poll that interpretational preferences were 'gradually changing.' A sympathetic reader would care because it suggests that theoretical and experimental advances in quantum foundations have not, so far, shifted where most physicists stand on what quantum theory means.

What carries the argument

The instrument that carries the argument is the repeated forced-choice poll question on preferred interpretation, kept comparable across polls by adapting the 2011 survey's questionnaire. Around it, the paper builds a comparison table of four historical polls and adds a Bayesian-network analysis with leave-one-out resampling to identify stable associations between answers. This machinery turns a single 40-person snapshot into a claim about a 25-year trend.

What would settle it

A fresh probability-based survey of a large, representative sample of working physicists that showed, say, many-worlds or pilot-wave interpretations ahead of Copenhagen, or a steady year-by-year decline in Copenhagen's share, would overturn the claim of 25-year stability; the observation needed is simply a different preference ordering in an unbiased sample.

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Extended reading notes

Core claim

On the paper's own terms, the discovery is the cross-decade stability of interpretational preference: in the new poll, 60% of the 30 respondents who answered the favorite-interpretation question chose Copenhagen, and this pattern matches the ordering in the 1997 workshop poll, the 2011 conference poll, and the 2016 online poll, while the strongly pro-pilot-wave result of the 2013 conference poll is treated as an artifact of that event's recruitment. The paper also finds that Copenhagen-minded respondents tend to view quantum randomness as fundamental and quantum states as purely statistical, and that physicists holding the completeness view that the wave function description is complete rarely switch interpretations. These correlations, the paper argues, fit the picture of Copenhagen as the default taught to students and as a pragmatically minimal position that avoids extra metaphysical baggage.

Load-bearing premise

The load-bearing premise is that 40 volunteers, self-selected from four Czech institutions by an email invitation with a bookstore coupon and filtered by an 8-minute completion cutoff, speak for the same underlying population as the earlier conference and online polls, so the comparison across decades means what the paper says it means.

Editorial extensions

If this is right

  • If the stability claim is right, interpretational preferences are governed more by education and pragmatic attitudes than by new experiments or theorems, so no near-term consensus should be expected.
  • The widely cited 'gradually changing views' conclusion from the 1997 poll would be wrong; apparent shifts like the 2013 pro-pilot-wave spike would be explained by who happened to attend.
  • Future polls should recruit from the general physics community rather than from quantum-foundation meetings, and should report the substantial 'no preferred interpretation' share.
  • The data link Copenhagen to a specific cluster of views (fundamental randomness, statistical quantum states, observer as formal role), so future studies could track this cluster as an indicator of Copenhagen's standing.

Reading between the lines

Editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • If the pedagogical-default explanation is correct, a curriculum that taught many-worlds or Bohmian mechanics earlier and more prominently would predictably erode Copenhagen's lead; this could be tested by polling students before and after such courses.
  • Because 53% of respondents in this poll said they have no preferred interpretation, the headline support for Copenhagen applies only to the minority who commit; an alternative framing that counts all physicists would put 'no preference' in first place.
  • The stability pattern could be checked quantitatively by re-analyzing the published response tables of all four earlier polls with the same Bayesian-network and correlation method, testing whether the Copenhagen-randomness-statistical cluster appears in each era.
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Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, and a circularity audit.

Referee Report

3 major / 6 minor

Summary. This manuscript reports a new survey on interpretational preferences in quantum mechanics, administered by email to physicists at four Czech research institutions, yielding 40 valid questionnaires after an 8-minute completion-time cutoff. The questionnaire adapts 10 of the 16 questions from Schlosshauer, Kofler, and Zeilinger (2013); the results are presented as descriptive distributions (Figs. 1-10), analyzed with Bayesian-network learning and jackknifed chi-square and Spearman tests (Figs. 11-13), and compared with four earlier polls (Tegmark 1998; Schlosshauer et al. 2013; Norsen and Nelson 2013; Sivasundaram and Nielsen 2016). The central claim, stated in Sec. 5, is that the 60% Copenhagen share among the 30 respondents who expressed a preference confirms a 'quite consistent pattern over a 25-year period' of relatively strong Copenhagen support among physicists who hold a preferred interpretation, and that observed fluctuations are mostly due to the biased audiences of specialized quantum-foundations events.

Significance. The paper is a descriptive contribution to the sociology of quantum foundations. Its genuine strengths are that the questionnaire, dataset, and analysis code are made available (Sec. 3.3), the descriptive statistics are presented clearly, and the authors explicitly acknowledge the informal and biased character of the earlier polls they compare against. If the stability claim survives scrutiny, the paper would supply a useful aggregation point: four polls across 25 years would indicate that Copenhagen's dominance among those who declare an interpretation is robust to the rise of quantum information, decoherence, and the modern Everett revival. The contribution is modest in size, however: N=40 overall (N=30 for the headline question), a self-selected volunteer sample recruited with a bookstore coupon, an arbitrary response-time cutoff, and cross-poll comparisons made without confidence intervals or formal tests. The paper's value therefore depends entirely on whether the cross-poll comparison can be placed on a defensible statistical footing; the major comments below identify the load-bearing points that need work.

major comments (3)
  1. [Secs. 3.2 and 5] The 8-minute completion cutoff is a free parameter that the paper justifies only by 'we considered this duration to be the minimum to meaningfully respond to the entire questionnaire.' The manuscript reports neither the number of responses excluded by this rule nor any sensitivity analysis. Since the headline result rests on N=30, even a handful of excluded fast responses could move the 60% figure materially, and the authors should report the exclusion count and re-run the Q7 analysis under a plausible range of cutoffs (e.g., 5, 8, and 12 minutes). A related design issue is that Q7 (Sec. 3.1) offers no 'no preferred interpretation' option, while Q9 (Fig. 9) records 53% of responders as having no preferred interpretation. The paper never reconciles these facts: if roughly half of the valid sample is undecided, the 30 Q7 responders are not automatically 'those who have picked an interpretation to begin with' as the conclusion in Sec. 5 phrases it, because a forced-choice question can inflate the apparent decider share. A cross-tabulation of Q9 by Q7 would clarify whether the no-preference respondents are realistically excluded from the headline number.
  2. [Secs. 2, 3.2, and 5] The stability claim requires that the 40 Czech volunteers be comparable to the populations surveyed by Tegmark, Schlosshauer et al., Norsen and Nelson, and Sivasundaram and Nielsen. The paper asserts this comparability ('our poll together with the Sivasundaram and Nielsen poll, were likely the most representative ones,' Sec. 5) but does not establish it, and its own data point in the opposite direction: the no-preference rate in Q9 is 53%, versus 36% in Sivasundaram and Nielsen as reported in Sec. 2. A 17-point gap of this size suggests either different sampling frames or different question functioning; in either case, the raw comparison of the 60% Q7 share with earlier figures is not yet valid. The authors concede in Sec. 5 that such biases 'inadvertently impacted our poll' but do not quantify them or bound their possible effect on the key comparison. A sensitivity or bounding analysis, or at minimum a formal comparison of the demographic and no-preference profiles across polls, is needed before the representativeness claim can be maintained.
  3. [Secs. 4.1 and 5] The central comparison mixes denominators. The present 60% is the share among the 30 respondents who answered Q7, whereas the comparative figures cited from earlier polls are shares of all poll respondents (e.g., 27% in Tegmark, 39% Copenhagen and 36% no-preference in Sivasundaram and Nielsen, 4% in Norsen and Nelson, all in Sec. 2). For a claim about 'those who have picked an interpretation to begin with,' the appropriate comparator for Sivasundaram and Nielsen would be the decider-only share, approximately 39%/(1-36%) = 61%, which is close to the present 60% and would support the authors' conclusion; however, this renormalization is never computed. Moreover, no confidence intervals or formal tests accompany the comparisons: the Wilson 95% confidence interval for 18/30 is roughly 42-75%, which overlaps the range of the earlier polls' reported shares, so the raw numbers alone cannot sustain the claim of a 'quite consistent pattern over a 25-year period' in either direction. The authors should report intervals for all Q7-derived estimates and either formally test the cross-poll differences or explicitly bound them.
minor comments (6)
  1. [Fig. 4] The option label 'A severe diffculty threatening quantum mechanics' contains a typo ('diffculty'), and the wording differs from the questionnaire text in Sec. 3.1, which reads 'A serious difficulty threatening quantum mechanics (Serious)'; the two should be harmonized.
  2. [Sec. 3.3] The sentence 'See R Core Team (2021) for details' is attached to the explanation of CPDAGs, but the R Core Team reference documents the R software environment, not graphical-model theory; the CPDAG explanation should cite the graphical-model literature already listed (e.g., Pearl 1988 or Koller and Friedman 2009).
  3. [Statements and Declarations] The Data availability statement says that 'The data that support the findings of this study are available within the article,' but the article contains only aggregate percentages; the raw data appear to reside in the GitLab repository mentioned in Sec. 3.3, and the statement should point readers there explicitly.
  4. [Sec. 3.2] The manuscript nowhere states when the survey was administered, which is essential for a claim about stability 'over a 25-year period'; the data-collection dates should be reported.
  5. [Sec. 3.1] Q7 is phrased 'Which interpretation of quantum mechanics do I prefer?', presumably a template remnant that should read 'do you prefer'; Q6 also lacks closing punctuation.
  6. [Sec. 3.1] The statement that the questionnaire was piloted and that 'No further validation was performed' is transparent, but the manuscript should also report the number of pilot participants and the nature of the wording adjustments, since question-functioning differences (especially the forced-choice format of Q7) are directly relevant to the cross-poll comparisons.

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged · score 0.0 of 10

No circularity: the paper reports direct poll tabulations and compares them with independently published prior polls; no fitted parameter or self-citation chain produces the headline preference shares.

full rationale

The paper's central claims are descriptive and comparative. The headline finding that Copenhagen interpretation received 60% of Q7 votes among N=30 respondents is a direct tabulation of the collected data (Fig. 7, Sec. 4.1), not a model output, fitted quantity, or derived quantity. The long-term stability conclusion in Sec. 5 is obtained by comparing this observed proportion with the independently published results of Tegmark (1998), Schlosshauer, Kofler, and Zeilinger (2013), Norsen and Nelson (2013), and Sivasundaram and Nielsen (2016). Those prior polls are external evidence, not self-citations, and the paper does not invoke any theorem or result of its own authors to force the interpretation of the data. The Bayesian network analysis and chi-square tests in Secs. 4.2 and 4.3 are exploratory and are not used to construct the Q7 shares or the stability comparison; they serve as supplementary dependence analyses, and any concerns about their robustness would be correctness or statistical-inference risks, not circularity. The acknowledged limitations, including the 40-respondent sample, the volunteer recruitment via email, the bookstore-coupon incentive, the 8-minute completion cutoff, and the high no-preference rate in Q9, are explicitly disclosed as potential biases. These limitations weaken the external-validity claim that the sample is comparable to earlier polls, but they do not make the conclusion equivalent to its inputs by construction: the stability claim is an empirical comparative inference that could in principle be falsified by different poll outcomes. No equation is defined in terms of the target result, no parameter is fitted to a subset and then renamed a prediction of a closely related quantity, and no load-bearing argument reduces to a self-citation. Therefore the appropriate finding is no significant circularity, score 0.

Assumptions & free parameters 1 free parameters · 4 assumptions · 0 invented entities

This paper does not derive quantitative results, so it introduces no fitted parameters in the physics sense. Its central claims depend on sampling and measurement assumptions, plus a hand-chosen response cutoff, rather than on a mathematical derivation.

free parameters (1)
  • 8-minute response cutoff = 8 minutes
    Responses completed in under 8 minutes were excluded as not meaningful; this arbitrary threshold changes the sample composition and could bias the results.
assumptions (4)
  • domain assumption Respondents' single-choice answers accurately reflect their stable interpretational views.
    The analysis treats each answer as a reliable measure of long-term preference; questions were piloted only for wording, not validity.
  • domain assumption The Czech institutional sample approximates the broader physics community.
    Generalization from 40 volunteers at Czech institutions to physicists broadly is assumed; the authors acknowledge it is not fully representative.
  • domain assumption Prior polls are comparable despite different instruments and samples.
    Cross-poll comparisons use different question wording, single versus multiple choice, and different recruitment; for example, Q3 merged two SKZ questions and Q7 restricted options.
  • ad hoc to paper An 8-minute completion time is the minimum for meaningful responses.
    No evidence supports this cutoff; it excludes fast respondents who may differ systematically.

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Cite this review

Pith. "Pith review of Has Anything Changed? Tracking Long-Term Interpretational Preferences in Quantum Mechanics." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/2XRNVYBC

@misc{pith2026250709988,
  author       = {Pith},
  title        = {Pith review of: Has Anything Changed? Tracking Long-Term Interpretational Preferences in Quantum Mechanics},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/2XRNVYBC}},
  note         = {Machine review of arXiv:2507.09988}
}
read the original abstract

As we approach the centennial anniversary of modern quantum mechanics this paper revisits the foundational debates through a new poll within the research community. Inspired by the survey by Schlosshauer, Kofler, and Zeilinger at the specialized 2011 Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality conference, we expanded our recruitment to include a more representative sample of the broader community of physicists with the aim to reveal potential shifts in scientists' views and compare our findings with those from several previous polls. While quantum foundations still lack a consensus interpretation, our results indicate a persistent preference for the Copenhagen interpretation. This enduring support likely reflects both the educational emphasis on the Copenhagen interpretation and its pragmatic appeal in avoiding complex metaphysical questions and introducing new notions (e.g., other worlds or the pilot wave). Our findings thus underscore the relative stability of interpretational preferences over the past decades.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2507.09988 by the authors.

Figure 1
Figure 1. FIG. 1. (Q1, RnD) [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p009_1.png] view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. FIG. 2. (Q2, Wdp): Do you believe that physical objects have their properties well [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p010_2.png] view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. FIG. 3. (Q3, Wdr): Is the quantum mechanical description of reality by a wave function [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p010_3.png] view at source ↗
Figures from the paper (9 more)
Figure 4
Figure 4. Figure 4: FIG. 4. (Q4, Msr): The measurement problem is: (N=37) [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p011_4.png]
Figure 5
Figure 5. Figure 5: FIG. 5. (Q5, Qs): What interpretation of quantum states do I prefer? (N=34) [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p012_5.png]
Figure 6
Figure 6. Figure 6: FIG. 6. (Q6, Obs): The observer (N=35) [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p012_6.png]
Figure 7
Figure 7. Figure 7: FIG. 7. (Q7, Qm): Which interpretation of quantum mechanics do I prefer? (N=30) [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p013_7.png]
Figure 8
Figure 8. Figure 8: FIG. 8. (Q8, Val): Superpositions of macroscopically distinct states. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p014_8.png]
Figure 9
Figure 9. Figure 9: FIG. 9. (Q9, Chn): How often have you switched to a different interpretation? (N=36) [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p014_9.png]
Figure 10
Figure 10. Figure 10: FIG. 10. (Q10, Phl): How much is the choice of interpretation a matter of personal [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p015_10.png]
Figure 11
Figure 11. Figure 11: FIG. 11 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p015_11.png]
Figure 13
Figure 13. Figure 13: FIG. 13 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p018_13.png]

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Reference graph

Works this paper leans on

3 extracted references · 3 canonical work pages

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    Castro, P., Bush, J. W. M., & Croca, J. (eds) (2024). Advances in Pilot Wave Theory – From Experiments to Foundations. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science,

    work page 2024

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    https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsb.2015.01.005 de Broglie, L. (1987). Interpretation of quantum mechanics by the double solution theory. Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie, 12(4), 1-22. de Broglie, L. (2021). Non-linear Wave Mechanics, a Causal Interpretation. Creative Media Partners. Fuchs, C. A., & Peres, A. (2000). Quantum theory needs no ‘interpret...

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    https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49861-9_1 Croca, J

    Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49861-9_1 Croca, J. R., Castro, P., Gatta, M., & Moreira, R. N. (2021). Louis de Broglie Realistic Research Program and the experimental detection of quantum waves. Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie, 46(1), 197-215. Camilleri, K., & Schlosshauer, M. (2015). Niels Bohr as philosopher of experiment: Does de...

    work page doi:10.1007/978-3-031-49861-9_1 2021

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Reviewed August 6, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.