The DOI matches its Crossref record.
AGAINST MANY-WORLDS INTERPRETATIONS
Open accessAbstract
This is a critical review of the literature on many-worlds interpretations, MWI, with arguments drawn partly from earlier critiques by Bell and Stein. The essential postulates involved in various MWI are extracted, and their consistency with the evident physical world is examined. Arguments are presented against MWI proposed by Everett, Graham and DeWitt. The relevance of frequency operators to MWI is examined; it is argued that frequency operator theorems of Hartle and Farhi-Goldstone-Gutmann do not in themselves provide a probability interpretation for quantum mechanics, and thus neither support existing MWI nor would be useful in constructing new MWI. Comments are made on papers by Geroch and Deutsch that advocate MWI. It is concluded that no plausible set of axioms exists for an MWI that describes known physics.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Decoherence, einselection, and the quantum origins of the classical
Zurek, W. H. (2003) · Reviews of Modern Physics · doi:10.1103/revmodphys.75.715 · Cited by 4,295
Decoherence, the measurement problem, and interpretations of quantum mechanics
Schlosshauer, M. (2005) · Reviews of Modern Physics · doi:10.1103/revmodphys.76.1267 · Cited by 1,443
Models of wave-function collapse, underlying theories, and experimental tests
Bassi, A., Lochan, K., Satin, S., Singh, T. P., & Ulbricht, H. (2013) · Reviews of Modern Physics · doi:10.1103/revmodphys.85.471 · Cited by 1,170
On the consistent histories approach to quantum mechanics
Dowker, F., & Kent, A. (1996) · Journal of Statistical Physics · doi:10.1007/bf02183396 · Cited by 364
Self-citationVaidman, L. (1998) · International Studies in the Philosophy of Science · doi:10.1080/02698599808573600 · Cited by 199
Metadata
- Authors
- KENT, A.
- Venue
- International Journal of Modern Physics A
- Publisher
- World Scientific Pub Co Pte Lt
- Published
- 1990-05-10
- Volume
- 05
- Issue
- 09
- Pages
- 1745-1762
- ISSN
- 0217-751X (ISSN-L)
- 1793-656X
- OpenAlex
- W2151533200
- Cited by
- 165
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 0.22
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: AGAINST MANY-WORLDS INTERPRETATIONS. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1142/s0217751x90000805
- The paper
- KENT, A. (1990). AGAINST MANY-WORLDS INTERPRETATIONS. International Journal of Modern Physics A. https://doi.org/10.1142/s0217751x90000805
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
