Why is the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics the most widely accepted one?

Why is the Copenhagen interpretation the most accepted one? I would say the answer is this:

  • it's the oldest more or less "complete" interpretation
  • hence you'll find it in many (all?) early text books, which is basically from where people writing modern text books copy from.
  • the overwhelming majority of physicists doesn't really care about the interpretation, since it (up to now) is only a matter of philosophy. We cannot know what interpretation is correct, because we can't measure differences, hence the interpretation question is a matter of taste rather than scientific knowledge.
  • most standard QM courses at university (at least the ones I know) don't bother with the interpretation. They just introduce the concepts, updates of knowledge, etc. and in that sense, the Copenhagen interpretation is just convenient.

This implies that if you ask a lot of physicists, some have never even thought about the matter. If interpretation is a matter of philosophy, why should we worry about it then? I can think of two points here:

a) By thinking also about interpretations of our theory we may come up with new theories that give us "nicer" interpretations of existing results, but they are essentially inequivalent to quantum mechanics. Bohmian mechanics from what little I understand about it is such a candidate, which might turn out to at one point make different predictions than classical quantum mechanics (up till now, it's just a different interpretation). This is of course a very good reason to think about it, because if quantum mechanics can not explain everything and there is a better theory, which can explain more with similarly "simple" assumptions, we want to have it.

b) It might help our understanding of "reality". This is only interesting, if you believe that your theory describes reality. If you believe that we only ever create effective models that are limited to a certain domain of our variables, then interpretations become uninteresting. Your model isn't the real deal after all, so why bother with something, you can't measure? It doesn't enhance our knowledge.

So, if you don't believe that science should (or even can) provide ontologic theories and if you don't think a better theory than quantum mechanics is maybe just beyond the horizon, then you don't care about interpretations of quantum mechanics. Otherwise, you should.


Due to historical reasons, physicists who do not have a strong preference for a particular interpretation default to the Copenhagen one, despite some of its pseudo-mythical outgrowth - which you can just ignore if you are in the 'shut up and calculate' camp.

It doesn't help that every other interpretation (at least those I know of) contains some flaw or quirk I find unacceptable as well, which would leave me with the statistical one (and perhaps consistent histories), basically not explaining anything at all.

The ones I like best are Cramer's transactional one and de Broglie's double solution, with the caveat that these should be backed by a theoretical framework beyond quantum mechanics, but aren't.

Personally, I'm one of these cranks who think that we should be able to back quantum mechanics with a realist theory (but a superdeterministic one): Start from de Broglie's double solution, throw in the geon model of elementary particles and ER=EPR and you're good to go.